Borderline Ego
by d3
Summary: Tweaks and consequences surrounding the 13th and 14th Angels. Takes a while to get off the ground. Comments are always welcome
1. Borderline Ego 1.00

Disclaimer / Intro:  
All characters etc. property of Gainax...... and I'd kill a man for a good piece of salmon....and then I'd kill em again if it would get me another piece.... and so on.....   
  
OK well just real quick here. To get up to speed on this thing, get out your Eva DVD, LD or VHS or whatever, and go to episode 19. Now fast forward to Shinji bursting through the wall of the command center then into the Eva cages and shoving the angel onto the launch catapult and subsequently being launched with the angel up the chute. Now pause it, and that is where we pick up.  
  
  
  
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Borderline Ego 1.00 (or "Reinventing the wheel in 30 days or less")  
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d  
  
  
  
As an old familiar voice picked up from somewhere among a crowd; superimposed over the din reverberating up and down his throat and through his spine, a thought came to him.  
  
'I'm going to kill this thing.'   
  
the realization came to him as something of a quiet surprise, but without anxiety and without argument. It was unexpected but there was no second guessing it. It simply became a matter of the fact.   
There arose in him a light serenity and relief, to be so doubtlessly committed to that end. Not unlike the first step to a free fall from a cliff. The clarity was euphoric, he couldn't help but to smile just a little while he screamed.  
  
The catapult he had forced the Angel onto, giving Misato the opportunity to launch them both from the main complex and back outside, reached the end of it's line, halting it's near supersonic ascent instantly. Unrestrained, the inertia propelled the eva and its's charges into the air and indeed, for a moment he was in free fall.  
  
Gravity re-asserted itself on the flying giants, drawing them back down to the earth. Shinji barely had the presence of mind to keep his enemy positioned firmly between himself and the fast approaching ground. The impact of the landing shook him forward from his seat, though he held fast to the control grips in his hands.   
  
He was trembling, his whole body shaken by the impact as well as the addition of this most recent burst of concentrated adrenaline it had convinced his body to release. He absently became aware of his own pulse throbbing in his ears. He almost felt la tinge of motion sickness coming on as he could feel his own pulse rocking his head forwards and back.  
  
The Angel was beneath him, driven well into the terrain under his weight and the ungodly force of their landing. From this position, his method of attack seemed simple enough.   
It can't move.  
Beat it to death.  
  
His heartbeat accelerated, his head continued to swell and contract in time to it.  
  
He was punching, rending, pulling to that rhythm, now pounding throughout his head and in the veins at either side of his neck.  
Punching. Smashing. Destroying.  
  
Killing. Murdering.   
  
Somehow amidst it all, this did not escape him. But it did not distress him as he might have thought it would. He was nauseous, a bit of bile adding a tang to the bloody taste of the LCL at the back of his throat. But it was somehow not totally unpleasant. It was not the nausea of guilt or anxiety, to which he was so firmly accustomed, but rather a twisting or an unwinding in his gut. A release. He felt no shame or remorse for this, his anointed task. This is what he was here for: to kill this thing. This was what had to happen since he got back in the entry plug.  
  
He tore into it like a righteousness man, sure of his station and his god's blessings.  
  
Shinji Ikari. Pilot of Eva Unit 01. Murderer of Angels. Because that's what eva pilots do.  
This thing was an Angel, therefore it was a foregone conclusion that he should kill it. Because that's what eva pilots do. If it hadn't shown up, if it's presence hadn't required that he get back into the entry plug that he had SWORN he would never again enter, he wouldn't have had to kill it.  
  
So death to it then; simple as that. Don't worry about the details, just kill thy enemy before thine enemy kills thee.  
  
Kill it so that he might save them.   
So that they may know that he was the one who saved them.  
  
He. Shinji Ikari.   
  
And for that, for being he, for being their eva pilot and savior, they would praise him. They would love him, take care of him.  
  
Misato would praise him.  
Ritsuko-San would praise him.  
Father would praise him, as he had done that one time before.   
Asuka, even she would have to admit he'd done a good thing, that he'd done a good job, and done it when nobody had expected him to. Not even she could deny that.  
Kensuke would praise him, his ignorance enviable and his envy insatiable. His friendship irreplaceable.  
Touji would praise him, an understanding between them now, as Touji knew what it meant to sit in the seat of an eva. He and Touji had suffered together.  
And Rei.... Rei, he was almost certain wouldn't do anything but she would know, and that was almost enough really. He could hope, though, that maybe someday he'd see that smile again. For him.  
  
Because he'd saved them.  
  
As the triumph and dillusion flushed his cheeks, and the smile on his face widened, curling higher and higher around the the corners of his mouth, the timer for the eva's internal power supply expired. The high pitched chime alerting him to this like a cruel headmaster's school bell, signaling that play time was over.   
The eva's backup battery, depleted after having been only partially charged to begin with and then used in high activity mode, had run out of power quickly.  
  
Shinji jolted, his skin tingling all over, like the feeling returning to a numb limb. He felt small, compressed and short of breath like his lungs were no longer large enough to accommodate the breath he needed to draw. Shinji found himself wrapped in the emergency light illuminated confines of the entry plug, rather than the view of the outside world as before. The world he was just on the verge of saving he thought.   
  
Shinji stared disbelievingly at the blank face of the wall ahead of him. Where there had been the image of his soon to be defeated enemy and the impending satisfaction of victory, there was nothing now but an unreadable barrier. He felt himself deflating through the opening left by his slack jaw.  
  
He had no view to gauge his bearings from, but he felt a great upwards heave, as the Angel presumably moved, still pinned beneath Unit 01. The nausea in his stomach burrowed, in hasty retreat, deeper into his intestines as he felt a great shift in his balance. Then stillness. Then another impact as before when he'd been launched from the catapult, only this time he far from ready for it.  
  
He slammed hard against the bulkhead of the entry plug with his left side, the momentum rolling him onto his front. hitting his head, biting into his tongue, and bloodying his nose as a result. His vision blurred momentarily, coming back to focus on the swirls of crimson floating in the amber LCL. He couldn't help but inhale the blood trailing out before him, not quite dissipated in the LCL, when his breath did once again find him.  
  
A tepid few seconds passed and Shinji wondered in silence if the Angel had moved on, resuming its decent into Nerv headquarters or on to wherever it's destination was. Shinji knew nothing of any kind of motivation behind the Angels' presence and attacks. They had been simply outlined as his enemy, and one need not understand one's enemy he thought.   
  
The image a bearded face with eyes obscured by glowing spectacles coming unbidden to his mind's eye.  
  
He had been so close, he thought. He could still feel the Angel's tough carapace, giving way with each strike of the eva's fist. He could feel the slackening of the Angels attempts at resistance, the energy leaving it's body, while the enthusiasm behind his fury had only continued to mount with each blow dealt against the thing. He had not meant to stop even when he had the Angel defeated. He had meant to punish this one. Coming so quick on the heels of the 13th Angel, Shinji had ample venom to excise through this kind of therapy.   
  
But that release was denied him now, the walls of the entry plug seeming to constrict around him while he himself continued to feel as though he were shrinking into a tighter and tighter frame.  
  
There was just so much silence.  
  
Then he felt the eva rock under some tremendous blow and the rumble of some explosion (he supposed) reverberating in the hollow plug. His fingertips stung with the pent up adrenaline.  
But he could only wait.  
He felt another blow struck against the eva, weaker than the first, but enough to shake the entry plug within the eva, and it was followed in short order by another, and another. He bent his head low and held it there in his hands.   
And then the panic boiled over in his heart and it burned at the back of his eyes.  
  
  
  
***************************************  
  
Asuka, still in her plug, her nerves still scintillating with the phantom hum of synchronization, let her hand fall from it's place around her neck. The points where her fingers had been pressing with slowly increasing pressure over the past few uncounted seconds, going on into minutes, tingled a bit more strongly than the rest of her body. The notable exception being the line around the front half around her neck, which stung like a fine papercut.   
  
Maya's fingers having been almost, but not quite fast enough to spare her that little bit.  
  
Her arms, around her shoulders, had surpassed the realm of perceptible pain in a flash of adrenaline and rage, the sensation would come as the nerves there cooled, but then being only a fraction of their original magnitude anyway as the effects of synchronization wore off.  
  
She reached out to engage the 'radio only' communication line after some more time spent breathing and she found the will to move had not left her completely. She was out of this fight, her connection severed and her eva disabled. She'd failed. She'd spent too long now with her own hand at her throat, trapped in the plug, thinking of nothing but that. She wanted any little thing now to think about rather than her own situation, and the radio would have to do. Even if it was just to fill her in on the static or screams that would precede the end of the world.   
  
Seeing as how she'd been their last best hope and all.  
  
Her hand stopped before engaging the line, her last line of thought giving her pause before she decided that the noise, whatever it was, would still be better than nothing and tuned in.  
  
***************************************  
  
  
Shinji was pulling at the controls spasmodically, alternating screams with whimpers. Some words and phrases came complete and intact from his mouth, some interrupted mid-enunciation as the next plea heaped on top of the preceding one.   
  
The LCL was stinging the back of his throat, worn and abrased from the screaming and bile.  
  
The pounding drowned his voice out, the ground falling out from beneath him, one brick at a time. He could feel his footing slipping, the hole beneath him opening up.  
  
Then in Shinji heard it; the heartbeat, beating contrary to his own.  
  
Then he felt it. It pulsed over his skin, swelling and contracting every one of his pores. The warmth leaving his body in an instant.  
Then it pulsed in his bones, rattling them, twisting tendon around skeleton.   
  
Then he felt his bones break.   
Then he felt his skin disappear.  
And then Shinji didn't hear the heartbeat anymore and he didn't feel it anymore, he just felt a breath moving through him. And he felt himself moving further and further away from where he'd been.  
  
***************************************  
  
  
  
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Misato's ears were ringing. Ever since the Angel had crashed through the command center wall, her ears had been ringing.  
  
The ringing now played an accompaniment to the the softer, low frequency hum of the elevator, she and several of the bridge staff now occupied as it ascended. A steady percussion was supplied by the the frenetic click clack of Maya's fingers at her laptop, continuing to monitor the eva unit and Shinji's fight from her place on the elevator floor.  
  
Misato often felt the detachment of the different aspects of her self when she entered into a combat or command situation. It was almost ritualistic. The "Major" would step up to center stage and the other faces to her personality would shuffle off to the balcony section in the audience to watch from afar. Sometimes booing, sometimes cheering. In just the past few seconds, though, she'd begun to feel different. Detached still, but perhaps just a bit more in touch with her fear than she could recall ever having been before in a combat situation.  
  
She'd been face to face with the angel, as it had smashed through the command center. Milliseconds from being annihilated, before Shinji, in Unit 01, made his own entrance. She had no doubt of the capabilities Shinji's fury coupled with Unit 01's sheer power, but she'd just seen this Angel walk through Units 02 and 00 like a steam roller over scarecrows. The bloody images of their valor ending in futility very fresh in her mind's eye. And so, as the elevator continued to rise, she felt more and more that a good part of her was still down in the command center staring numbly ahead, waiting for the silence of obliteration.  
  
Amid her thoughts then, she heard, as if from the other side of a closing door, Maya's exclamation that Unit 01's power had expired. All activity had ceased.   
Then all she heard was her own voice.  
  
  
She ran through the short hallway leading from the elevator after she made her exit as soon as the sliding doors would permit. Her skin prickled as it met the cooling air outside. The tightness in her skin redoubled and spread even further down into her gut as she saw Eva unit 1 impact against the pyramid wall just a few hundred meters away.  
  
Almost leisurely, the Angel righted itself from it's former position, where it had been laying on the ground, and floated over to the prone form of Shinji's Eva, stopping some distance from it. One of it's razor arms unfurled and lashed out, cutting into the side of the eva's chest. The severed blood vessels spewed their contents forth as a red geyser.   
Misato momentarily flashed to fresh memories of the other two eva's defeats. Asuka's unit, surgically stripped of it's massive arms and then casually beheaded. Images of Rei, through the haze of an exploded N2 mine, dispatched with an incision through her head.   
  
Was it the Angel's intention now to toy with them, patiently dissecting Shinji and Unit 01 into their component parts?  
  
A bright light and an explosion and the armor covering the eva's chest was vaporized. A dull blood red orb visible underneath, set into the eva's flesh.   
  
The instant sense of recognition surprised her. Misato's shock drew her back to herself. She became very acutely self aware with this new development - a core, the "heart" of the Angels, within the eva. In fact, she became almost disoriented as she adjusted to the heightened sensitivity to the slightest of stimuli: the chill of the air, the slight breeze, the irregularity of the land beneath her feet, her own heartbeat rocking within her ribcage. The vague mist of sensations milling about her was suddenly coalescing into streams of information flooding her through each sensory pipeline. She opened herself wide to accept it all, knowing ,somehow, that years from now she would be able to recall with perfect clarity and illusory tangibility the tang of ozone in every breath she drew then and the slight ride in her underwear. This was, of course, all dependent on her survival of the next few hours.  
  
Something was happening, and if she blinked, she was sure she would miss the critical point in it all.   
  
Perhaps it was simply that she wanted to be perfectly aware of the the moment she died.  
  
In-as-much as one can read the expression of something so alien, Misato thought the Angel almost seemed puzzled itself by the this new development. It began to poke at the exposed core. smashing at it with those deceptively powerful arms, while Unit 01 lay immobile and defenseless.  
  
Again and again, it pounded at the core. A methodical rhythm to the assault. Misato was having trouble breathing, a writhing tightness in her chest and her unconscious refusal to blink made her fit to pop.  
  
Bang  
Bang  
Bang  
  
If Rei had been present and conscious then, she might have thought that the sound reminded her of her own apartment. Though she probably wouldn't mention it.  
  
Bang  
  
Then Unit 01's good hand came up, and sparks streamed between it's fingertips as it grabbed hold of the Angel's arm.   
Unit 01 pulled, and the Angel jerked over, crashing imbalanced, headlong into Unit 01.   
For a moment, while fate reached out to turn over the next card, they were eye to eye.  
  
Misato saw this and finally, in spite of herself, she blinked.  
  
  
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"I don't know for certain what it is you've set in motion with this Ikari, but I can't help but think that this is a gamble, even for you.  
  
The old sensei  
  
  
  
Silence from the Commander, no longer at liberty to consider himself a man.  
  
  
  
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a day and a night later  
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"Have you taken your break yet?"  
  
"No, not yet. Um, can you run this script down to the labs for me and then I can grab a coffee or something."  
  
"No problem. Sit down for a while. The worst of it seems to be over and we're moving a lot of the less serious cases to outside hospitals, so our load should ease up pretty soon."  
  
"Ah, thanks. (sigh) Oh, can you tell them in the labs that the script is for the pilot in 383. I don't want them to freak out at the weird meds we're giving our patients. We're always getting orders to fill her up with some bizarre cocktail or another."  
  
*chuckles* "Ours is not to question why"   
"Indeed, not where Nerv is involved"   
  
A pause  
  
"Anyway, go. Get some rest for a minute then see if they need help with the lunch pickup.   
  
"Thanks, see you in a bit."  
  
  
Two nurses  
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Room 383  
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Ayanami Rei measured these past waking hours by the opening and closing door, letting in doctors and nurses, light and sound. By the fading of the residual spots in her vision after she patiently stared ahead while a bright beam was aimed at her cornea. The tics of the machines. Watching the slow decent of the needle's plunger. The the gradual rising level of her own red blood filling narrow glass tubes, passing one thin white line then another.  
  
She'd been unconscious since yesterday and most of that day she learned. The commander had not contacted her as yet.  
  
When the doctors left, she continued to silently log the passing of time by the metronome rhythm of the painful throb in her forehead and between her eyes. It was becoming distressful.   
  
The doctor, Akagi-San, had not come to check on her personally either. In the absence of those two persons, she was left with many unknowns concerning many things. She knew nothing of the details of her own survival or of the apparent resolution to the recent battle. She had her questions but having questions was not new to her. She had only to believe that what she needed to know would be eventually provided to her, all else was extraneous. All she had to do was to believe in that one constant.  
  
Though some days, in the rare absence of that consoling, absolute faith - usually early in the morning or late at night, or whenever she strayed from her regiment of prescriptions - the questions persisted.  
  
But it was not her business to worry over what she did not know. It never had been. Her business now was simply to recover. Recover so that she would be ready when needed. Ready to fulfill her purpose. All else was just the means to that end.  
  
She had nothing to worry about.  
  
It was a simple, though sometimes necessary, thing to keep reminding herself of these immutable facts of her existence. However, early on some years ago, during one of her frequent stints spent lying on her back, inspecting the hospital ceiling, she had reasoned to herself that idle thoughts and speculation were acceptable and, to an extent, worthwhile, just so long as she remained mindful that anything she concluded on her own terms may be refuted, without question, by a higher power. Her mind and thoughts were her own, to do with as she saw fit, just so long as she stayed within the framework outlined by the commander.   
  
She had always been encouraged to practice rational thinking and actively engaging her own problem solving skills, so there was nothing wrong with mulling over some unknowns. This way she might find solutions to some of her problems of her own accord, supplying answers to her own satisfaction, without needing to approach the commander with her small uncertainties.  
  
She took some measure of pride in these small accomplishments. She was self conscious to an extreme in this regard. As uncomfortable as she knew some people were under the lenses of her her binocular crimson scrutiny, she kept those eyes trained on herself with even greater scathing focus. There was not one thing about herself that she was not critical of, though that was not to say she was negatively critical of herself. After all, she need only be aware of her self and her condition, not have an opinion necessarily.  
  
Still, she kept these small matters to herself, never broaching the subject of personal pride and accomplishment with the commander. Never coming to him outright for his praise in those matters. He gave her his attention, that was enough.  
  
In time the nurses had made their final rounds, collecting dinner trays and making last notations to the status reports. The lights in the rooms were all turned down as the hospital staff prepared for the night shift.  
  
Her cell phone, set on a table beside her bed, rang at last.  
  
Sitting up and reaching over, she had little doubt who it would be as she had been waiting for this call all day.  
Answering the phone, she spoke for the first time in a great while.  
"Hai."  
"Rei," A pause. "how are you?" That low, even, voice at the other end, that voice that spoke volumes if you read between the lines. It was doubly masked behind it's reserved tone and it's detachment, reaching her here, while it's source lay elsewhere. She settled herself onto her bed, at last feeling like making herself comfortable.  
  
"My condition is stable."  
  
***************************************  
  
The day prior to Ayanami's awakening, another young pilot had been brought in to the hospital amid a flood of others injured in the attack, she was then rushed off to the specialized ward set aside for herself and her teammates. After just barely submitting to the most cursory of examinations by a pair of specialists from the special Eva pilot recovery team, she had been promptly released with no apparent injuries or complications from her own all-too-brief involvement in the Angel battle. Her shoulders did have some lingering ache in them and her underarms felt especially sensitive. These discomforts, though, were negligible in the face of the cold sickness she felt at the base of her gut. Her abdominal muscles clenched against the quickening of the malignant boil of injured pride and resentment rapidly gestating within her.   
  
She made her way to the exit from her examination room, clad in her plug suit and a light jacket supplied by the hospital staff. She was eager to be away from the smell and white-washed vacuum light of the place. But most of all, to her mind, hospitals were a place of sickness, a place where people were treated for their weakness and had others lick their wounds; she sought to be out from the confines of such a symbol of defeat as soon as she could. She thought she might go mad otherwise.  
  
The hallways were buzzing with activity. But a busy hive is still just a hive, and she had precious little patience for the drones littering her way.   
  
The Geofront complex had taken severe damage and there were a great number of casualties. The Angel had done its fair share of damage, but in it's desperation, Nerv too, had taken liberties in the form of a close quarters N2 mine detonation which had damaged several shelters as well as the city of Tokyo 3 hanging from the ceiling. The hospital staff were trained for these types of mass emergency situations though. As a part of Nerv, the organization sold to the world as the fine line between destruction at the hands of the incomprehensible angels and survival, this hospital was prepared for worst case scenarios the likes of which made this seem old hat. Not every contingency plan revolved around the threat of angel attack either. Nerv may have been cast in the role of savior to the world at large, but that did not mean that it was without its detractors. And among those detractors, there were fanatics.  
  
When she reached the exit, there was a Section 2 agent waiting for her outside. In contrast to the chalky flourescence inside, night had fallen in the time since the she had gone into battle. The darkness active with emergency vehicle lights and such moving about the landscape.  
  
'All the king's horses and all the king's men...'  
  
The Section 2 agent spoke: "Major Katsuragi will be late, handling the emergency situation at headquarters. I've been assigned to escort you home."  
  
Asuka hadn't seen or heard from Misato at all since the battle. Up to now she'd been too preoccupied, grappling with her own inner turmoil to really notice or take it as anything unusual. Now, though, it became apparent that Misato would once again be too busy, too busy to come see her, too busy to worry about her. Her, the Eva pilot who couldn't win.   
  
Because it is a difficult thing to understand a person - to appreciate all that one may do for another, and the difficulties that may arise to hamper or prevent one from expressing their desire to care for and take care of another - Asuka was hard pressed to understand that the presence of this Section 2 agent was in fact Misato's best effort to extend some presence of herself to protect and take care of her young charge after the battle, while she was forced to deal with things she had never thought possible.   
  
Despite Misato's best intentions, Asuka wanted no company the likes of which the agent could offer her.   
  
"Tell Misato to go fuck herself with a fucking broom stick, moron!"  
  
The Section 2 agent did nothing as she strode past him into the night progressing beyond the building's lights.  
  
After she'd passed, he stood there a few moments more before he prepared to turn and track her. He stopped mid turn when he heard from some distance:  
  
"And don't fucking follow me, asshole."  
  
He couldn't help but get a little unprofessional amusement from that.  
  
***************************************  
  
"And in other news this morning, Nerv a spokesperson issued a special notice of apprectiation on behalf of the spectacular efforts of all the hospitals, employees, and volunteers who helped through the recent tragedies associated with the latest Angel attack. The notice comes five days after the attack, amid continuing reconstruction of buildings and several shelters. The attack had claimed the highest number of casualties at one time since the mysterious creatures, dubbed 'Angels', began appearing.   
It is widely believed that the statement is meant to boost morale and reassure the city's population that Nerv is taking to heart the concerns of the people under it's protection."  
  
***************************************  
  
Some days, Aida Kensuke just felt like turning his video camera on, directing it at no place in particular while he set it down atop his school desk, and then just shutting his eyes and putting his head down. If anything of note happened that day, his videocamera; unmoving, unblinking, and utterly oblivious, had as much chance of catching it as he did.  
  
He was an incorrigibly resourceful boy, eager for excitement and any of the trouble that came traipsing on it's heels. Be that excitement in the form of action and mischief or through the subtle wiles of information and intrigue. His laptops at home and at school usually provided him with ample yarns to get himself wound up with. This provided the information and intrigue and that would have to suffice as despite his best efforts, he found himself increasingly left out of the action.   
  
He almost couldn't help but to take it a little personally.   
  
After all, he'd personally asked to become an eva pilot and that opportunity was denied him, that honor inexplicably passing over his head and falling upon the shoulders of unwilling candidate after unwilling candidate. First Shinji, Now Touji.   
  
The last Kensuke had heard 'officially', Shinji had been leaving Nerv, leaving Tokyo 3, and turning his back on eva. That had been the same day as the last Angel attack though, and from what he'd overheard from Asuka in one of her rants to Hikari, 'Baka-Shinji' had been involved in the fight, piloting Unit 01.  
  
Touji had not returned to school since his activation test and subsequent hospitalization for injuries he had somehow incurred, just a little over a week ago. The nature and extent of those wounds still not totally known to Kensuke. Despite their long-standing friendship, and Kensuke's normally rabid penchant of digging for data surrounding such things, he had not gone yet to visit his friend and had not found much in his less than thorough investigations of the matter. In all honesty, he was a little miffed right now.  
  
Not truly angry with his friends, but feeling more than a little left out; he was sulking.  
  
Kensuke held absolutely no maIice towards his friend and wished for nothing but a speedy recovery for Touji and peace of mind for Shinji, where ever he was. Kensuke was a natural optimist and young, these traits leading him to somewhat blindly assume that whatever Touji's injuries were, they couldn't possible be that bad. If they were anything serious, he would have heard about them, right? They were best friends after all, so Touji would have let him know somehow if he were really in trouble. That's what friends do.   
Right?  
Nevermind that he hadn't even been spared a notice that his friend would be an eva pilot now.  
  
The prolonged absence was unexplained but perhaps Touji was not absent solely for the sake of his injuries, now that he was an eva pilot and all. There was probably training and procedure they were trying to impress upon him. Kensuke almost had to chuckle at the thought of that. Thinking of the headache involved in trying to get his friend to commit anything remotely academic or complex to memory. There was probably still several bits of ultra high tech equipment he had to familiarize himself with. Secrets he had to be sworn to secrecy on.   
  
Insulating himself with these kinds of thoughts kept Kensuke from ever long considering that his friends were anything but missing under the typical Nerv circumstances. Which had always turned out alright in the end before.  
  
In the midst of his musings, he missed the look the class rep wore as she walked over, approaching him. When she spoke up, standing before him he was startled and a little alarmed, by the concern in her voice.  
  
"Aida-kun"   
  
Jolting visibly; "Ah, hey class rep." collecting himself from the initial shock; "Um, what can I do for you?"  
  
Hikari was hesitant, her smile crooked with nervousness and her words came out imbalanced, drawn out but then sharp and crisp at the termination of each word, like it just barely got out before her reservations clamped down on it.   
  
"Have you... you've heard about Suzuhara-kun, right?"  
  
Aida affirmed  
  
"Have you gone to see him yet, in the hospital?"   
  
Kensuke's eyes wavered from their contact with the class rep's, he leaned back away from her a bit as he sat sideways in his chair, his right hand flexing lightly on top of his desk, his other hand draped over the back of his seat.   
  
"Um, no. I haven't gotten a chance to get by there, I figured he might be kinda busy, you know, with doctors and Nerv stuff."  
  
Hikari saw that the boy's behavior was blatantly out of character. He would normally jump at the chance to be that much closer to anything smelling faintly of Nerv, to have one more person to quiz impossibly on it's myriad of technical data and details. She guessed that perhaps, though, he was more than just a little disappointed this time to have another chance pass him by. His great aspiration passing over him and instead selecting another friend as an eva pilot, while he remained a mere hopeful. Perhaps it was hard to see Touji because he was just a little jealous of his friend.  
  
She felt for the boy's disillusionment but certainly felt some things were more important and so was still more than a upset at his balking. But she wasn't here to rebuke the boy, just to get him to help her.  
  
"He's.... he would probably appreciate a visit, I think."  
  
A small group of students filed through the classroom door. Hikari's eyes flicked over to see who it was that had walked in, then pressed on, eager to finish with her request before there were certain other people present.   
  
"I went by to see him." Prepared to dissuade any misconceptions or potential embarrassments she added, hastily. "To check on him, as the class rep, as part of my duties. It was just once, last week after school but.... " She gently shook her head, clearing it of this excess, just meaning to come out with it now. "....would you mind going by there with me to check on him again, today after school." Still unable to leave it just at that, she tacked on as an afterthought, "He needs to at least get his papers from class delivered to him."  
  
In the course of Hikari's starts and stops, Kensuke's eyes had unconsciously settled on Touji's desk towards the back of the room. His head slightly turned away from Hikari as a result. He kept his eyes there while he quickly tried to consider her request. He was flustered, confused as to why she was asking him this as well as confused and slightly irritated as to why he was being so hesitant. Finding no easy answers to his questions, he relented before the pause grew too awkward.   
  
Turning his full attention back to her, he smiled; a tightness to it that he did not like thinking felt just a little guilty, and said: "Sure class rep, uh any time. We'll just, uh, head on over after school today, I guess?"  
  
Hikari sighed, relieved, answering him now with a much lighter smile, "Yes, today after school." then her smile and her tone taking on a more firm, authoritative edge, "You have clean up today, so we'll go after your duties are done."  
  
Kensuke sighed, resignedly bowing his head. He did not mean to look like he was resistant to go see his friend and he was more than a little annoyed at himself for seeming that way so much just now.   
  
Hikari, satisfied, turned and went back towards the front of the class, to her seat. Where she would now await the arrival of her friend, Asuka.   
  
Before class began she wanted to get a chance to talk to Asuka in order to figure out what was troubling the girl so. Asuka had only been back to school since the Angel attack, herself, a few days ago. Asuka had assured Hikari that she was perfectly fine and had sustained no injuries through the fight. Her absence the past few days was a result of some special training and increased testing that had followed the attack; all unecessary of course, as she was already perfectly well trained enough to defeat the Angels on her own terms. Hikari had no doubts of Asuka's conviction in this.  
  
The part that Hikari had still felt some concern at was the perceptible skirting of the issue on the occasion that Ikari-kun ever be mentioned, particularly of his whereabouts after it was revealed that he had participated in the fight even after his alleged swearing off of Nerv and eva. Most of these details coming to Hikari after the fact as she had only heard from Kensuke that Shinji was to have left Tokyo 3, after she had heard from Asuka that he had been active in the battle. The situation was further convoluted when Asuka had made it seem though that she had not been supposed to let on about any of Shinji's involvement.  
  
Nerv and everything involved with it, including the pilots, were just so complicated.  
  
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"Are you going to go check on the Suzuhara patient next?"  
  
"In a minute, I need to go down to get a new script filled out for him. We're trying to lower the dosages on his pain medicine at his request." Chuckling "He's a headstrong young man he is; very proud, doesn't want to have to rely on any old pain killers. No, he'd rather suck it up like a man."  
  
The Nurses laughed lightly between themselves for a moment at that. They'd both seen ample cases of the incurable brashness of youth being so loathe to rely on such crutches as modern medicine. His was just a particularly amusing instance, especially in light of the fact that he was so doggedly insistent that his younger sister, also in the hospital, be given the utmost in proper, modern care and comfort.  
  
The two of them, the brother and sister Suzuhara, were as much cause for somber thoughts as they were of levity in that hospital; incarnations of tragedy and resilience as they were.  
  
"Ah well, he's going to be released soon isn't he?"  
  
"Yes, and not a minute too soon it seems. he's just barely begun to mend and he's all fired up to be back with his friends at school."  
  
"Hardly seems the type to want to get back to school for his studies"  
  
Chuckling "No. I suspect that pretty young lady that comes to see him has a bit more to do with it."  
  
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In the aftermath of his injuries, Touji had at first been very reluctant to go see his sister, going so far as to ask the class rep to lie to his sister on his behalf. That first time his classmate had come in to see him, lying in that hospital bed, Touji had felt swept up in an irrational sense of shame. It may have been in part due to massive dosages of pain killers in his system; those medications that kept his eyes bleary and his speech slurred. But the shame had fundamentally been his own, whether it was blown out of proportion chemically or not.   
He had not wanted his little sister to know that he, her big brother, had been injured. He had always tried to be the embodiment of physical endurance and empowerment to her. His own young predilection for sports and physical activities spurred on by the admiration he'd seen in his sister's eyes early on. He didn't want her to see him set back while she still struggled to recover.  
  
He had also felt shamed in the class rep's first visitation by his condition then, in front of her. He had been gladdened by her visit, he did not mean to ignore that, but he couldn't help but wish it had been under different circumstances; any number of different circumstances.  
  
It wasn't nearly as hard to have her see him physically incapacitated as it would have been to have his sister know him like that. She was older and had a different understanding of things like that. But as delinquent as he seemed, as little as he seemed to care for book smarts and intelligence, it shamed him to have Hikari see him as she had that first time. So...slow.   
For that, he knew he had the drugs to hold to account. His speech was slurred, his wits dimmed, the effect of the medications there to encourage sleep and dull the pain from the head trauma he'd suffered.   
No matter how colloquial or informal he was normally in speech, he was always witty, he thought. He had always tried to hold his own in that regard. He knew the stereotype that surrounded him, 'The Dumb Jock', and while he cared little in majority for who thought of him that way, the class rep was a different case.  
  
Under sedation; his mouth full of ants and his mind riddled with the silk of caterpillars, he thought that, despite his efforts to seem casual through the whole exchange; to her, then, he must have looked a fool. A poor, pitiful, stupid, broken fool.   
  
After some time though and Hikari following up her visit some days later with Kensuke in tow, Touji's spirits had risen considerably. News of, or rather, lack of news concerning Shinji, when that subject was broached, was still cause for a few moments of chewing on one's bottom lip and quiet deaths of laughter, but they each held to their own optimism. The two boys even offering some moments of levity as they supposed the young Ikari's fate in light of his living arrangements, his young roommate and their classmate in particular.   
  
Bolstered by the rejuvenation he felt once his own recovery really began to take hold, he came to view his situation as less an inconvenience to his younger sister, and perhaps an opportunity for encouragement. Seeing his own successful recovery might help her now, knowing that her admired big brother could sustain injury and persevere just as she had. It wasn't long then, before he had gone to see his sister personally, then eventually with the company of his now frequent visitors.  
  
Touji's physical health had only continued to rise with his friends help, but through their proximity, they all felt the queasy disquietude infecting the open wound left by their friend's disappearance. The cut having grown a light scab over it's surface, but without the antiseptic of a proper explanation from either the Second Children or from any of the Nerv staff in the hospital itself, the affected area was becoming raised and tender to the touch.  
  
Still, Touji would be leaving the hospital soon. He looked forward to being able to go to school in order to question the Second Children now himself.  
  
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"Hey class rep?"  
  
"Yes Aida-kun?" Horaki Hikari was presently shuffling some papers in order in preparation for the start of the school day and did not pause from her task or look up to meet the attention of the boy. She feared her manners were not what they ought to be, but feared that not strongly enough to change herself this instant.  
  
It was a small slight easily forgiven between them now, he knew the tension she harbored quietly, and as they were many mornings these days, they were alone.   
  
"Touji comes back today, right?" A redundant question, one he knew the answer too, but one not asked for the answer's sake.  
  
"Yes," turning from her papers now, giving the boy a smile, almost sad, but mostly friendly, reassuring and not a little relieved. "he's coming back today."   
  
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"Hey Maya. Haven't seen you on the bridge much."  
  
"Oh, hello, Aoba-san"  
  
Lightly jogging to catch up with the slow moving woman in the hallway; "Man, you look worn. How many all nighters have you been pulling this week?"  
  
Almost blushing from the indirect praise, but lacking the energy to do so, she readjusted the slipping stack of papers she cradled. "I haven't been to my apartment in almost a week and a half." She exhaled tiredly, "Akagi-sempai has been running over every simulation forwards and backwards....I've been....." Her train of thought drifted, her eyes falling down to trace the seam along the hallway they were walking down, where the floor joined the wall.   
Finally, though, she concluded her statement with the one thought that kept her up at night....after night.   
  
"We only get one chance at this."  
  
"..... Yeah, I know."  
  
  
  
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For Ayanami, the past four weeks had been increasingly difficult, and this surprised her. Many of the routines and patterns that she had become accustomed to and, in a fashion, depended upon, were still carried out, but she detected much more of a secondary priority to them. The synch tests had always been mundane, but she had always felt that at least most of the participants understood to some degree the importance of the tests as necessary to their ability to combat the angels effectively. The tests may have been lacking in dynamic, but dynamics were counterproductive to the purpose of the tests, as dynamics implied variations and inconsistencies, the purpose of the tests was to maintain consistency and minimize variations in perfomance. The tests were a necessity and, until recently, had been a priority. Now, though, she felt the attention being granted to the tests and diagnostics were being performed with less than the utmost rigor.   
  
She knew why, and understood as well the importance of recovering the Third Children, Ikari-kun, or at least the salvaging of Unit 01's usability, but she did not want her own duties and obligations to go lax and unchecked.  
  
She was thankful, then, that here her sessions with the dummy plug still carried their same weighty secrecy, still demanded the same high level of performance and attention to detail from those scarce few involved. Every time, though she was reluctant to leave the great tank, her place of highest purpose and meaning, when the commander would inform her that the sessions were concluded, she always smiled.   
  
She knew about the salvage plan. She knew about it's origins and it's success record. Knowing this, as the day for the plan to be implemented approached, she found herself more than occupied with thoughts of her missing team mate, and the very real probability that he was a person she may never see again.  
  
'the plan to recover Pilot Ikari is to be carried out tomorrow. The commander has not talked of it much with me, beyond the orders that pilot Souryu and I will be on hand in our evas in case of an emergency.'  
  
Unit 01's berserker tendencies were not lost on Ayanami. Her own Unit 00 was prone to inexplicable bouts of violence, though hers had never occurred without power or the presence of a pilot, as Unit 01 had. The prospect of having to combat another eva, after the incident with Unit 03 and the 13th Angel, did not appeal to her. The plan being that if there were any problems concerning a possibly berserk or out of control Unit 01, the 3 eva units would be ejected to the surface where Units 00 and 02 would deal with it.  
  
Pilot Souryu had referred to that part of the plan as 'Just one more case where I have to clean up after Baka-Shinji.'  
  
As she'd been during the time they waited to make their final assault on the 12th Angel, Ayanami felt...distressed at The Second's comments concerning the Third. There had been many such outbursts from her teammate. Ayanami had not confronted the other pilot those times as she had before, but had elected instead to puzzle over her reactions, then and now.  
  
Ayanami was like a stuck record concerning her thoughts and feelings surrounding the Third, Ikari-kun.  
Why had his behavior towards her always differed from others?  
Why had she responded to him the way she had? He'd embarrassed her. She'd smiled for him. She'd...thanked him. Why had she seen fit to do so?   
She's slapped him as well, but why had she singled him out, that one time, to lash out against. She heard many others say much worse about the commander regularly, yet never felt so compelled as she had then.  
Why did she wish Souryu-san not to speak ill of Ikari-kun? He was not the commander, but to have the Second speak of Ikari-kun as she did...angered her, much as she had been angered when Ikari had spoken against the commander.   
Why did it matter that she find answers to any of her questions or not?  
  
"Why?"  
  
That single word, she thought, was the impetus behind so much of humanity's strife and achievement. Empires and cultures had fallen and been ground to a fine powdery dust under the weight of the word. The dust settled across the expanse of humanity, then to be dispersed in a cloud of fine particles every time we roused ourselves to propose another query. The clouds obscuring our collective hindsight of things. It was humanity's tragedy and humanity's blessing all at the same time.  
  
And she would help to resolve all that  
  
Such thoughts as this were what Ayanami turned to, unconsciously, to keep from ever really recognizing her own despair. In this way, she kept herself constantly positioned in the context of the whole of humanity. It was a long standing, learned behavior.  
  
She knew she had once told Ikari-kun that Eva was her bond to humanity. Though she was still struggling how to articulate it, she had begun to feel that perhaps she had something else there to bond her to humanity. She was under the impression that this was an idea that Ikari-kun had been trying to convince her of, as it seemed that he wanted to try to reach her somehow beyond the boundaries of Nerv and Eva. She did not believe that Ikari-kun might know something that the Commander did not, but she did consider that perhaps Ikari-kun might tell her something that the Commander might not.  
  
She did not understand. It was still so incomplete. Again all she could come back to was the hollow space of 'why'.  
  
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Asuka had not had a good day in a good long while. For weeks now, though she and Ayanami still reported in regularly for synch tests, she knew that the bulk of Nerv's attention and resources were being focused squarely on the unoccupied length of Unit 01's entry plug. Baka-Shinji, of all things.  
  
She'd seen the tapes, heard and read the reports, all as part of the pilots' regular debriefing. She'd suffered it all, shielded in scowl and silence. Her defeat and his victory.   
  
Asuka could not get over how much she had WORKED to get to where she was, to earn every bit of skill and dignity she had, and how much that little nobody had just fallen into the role of hero. How he could just waltz in and save the day, just by showing up.   
  
She wanted Shinji back so much she could taste it. She wanted him back so she could see him once again cowering through his life. Stumbling and apologizing and sniveling, not this fucking hero thing that the monitors painted him out to be every time they replayed Unit 01 smash through the command center and plow into that Angel. Shinji wasn't powerful. Shinji wasn't brave. Nobody else had to live with him, they didn't go to school with him. They didn't see what a small scared little boy he was, how weak he was, and undeserving of their praise and gratitude. He was just barely worth saving, but she did want him back, just so she could yell at him one more time.  
  
She hardly saw Misato at home, and to Asuka, that suited her just fine. Misato would probably just drink herself stupid and then pine over Shinji's absence. It was enough that Asuka had to walk past "Shinji's lovely suite" every day. Sometimes she'd throw open the door ready to yell at him to wake up and make breakfast, just to let the outburst die in her throat after a moment and slam the door shut.   
  
In school she'd had her hands full fending off the recently reunited Idiot Duo; still frantically searching for their third wheel, since one of them was currently operating with less than two good legs.  
  
Their persistent nagging had been a barbed thorn in her side dipped in lemon juuice. It hadn't been so bad at first, especially when it had just been Kensuke by himself. But ever since Suzuhara's return when she walked into the classroom in the mornings, she could just smell the ozone and hear the pathetic grinding of the gears in their heads as they combined their efforts in the hopes of synthesizing a clue between the two of them. They thought they were being covert in their little operations, trying to slip her up with confirming or denying the garbage they dug out of the trash heap that was Nerv's false information system, designed to distract and confuse overeager fools just like them.   
  
The one thing they had been most effective in annoying her with, though, was the subversion of her friend Hikari to their ignorant crusade. Apparently not even Asuka's influence was enough to immunize Hikari against the exotic disease that crippled the intellect as it chewed on the spinal column, gradually removing every last trace of a backbone in it's host. The illness making itself evident through acute symptoms of giving a shit about Shinji. So even from her best friend she suffered the questions, though she had to give Hikari credit as being far more refined and subtle in her interrogations.   
  
And she definitely did not like the looks being exchanged between Hikari and the jock on wheels.   
  
Thank God she didn't have to see him regularly at Nerv.  
  
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"Oye, Fireball, where's Shinji?"  
  
God, weren't they as tired of asking that as she was of answering it? Asuka was almost thankful she could still get mad about it, as many times as she had been asked it, and subsequently blown it off; she didn't want to appear that her vehemence was wearing down.  
  
"The hell if I know. I told you, they shipped him of for some special training or another since he was so incapable piloting like anything more than a rank amateur. It wasn't any of my business, and I sure as hell didn't care enough to ask."  
  
"Seemed pretty capable ta me, last I saw 'im" Touji grumbled under his breath, but left it at that. He hadn't gotten anywhere the first thirty times he'd asked that, and he doubted this was the breakthrough he sought. He had not participated in a full scale public display with the girl since his return to school from his stay in the hospital. The majority of his classmates surprised at his changed demeanor. His spirits being much more somber and reserved in the classroom, more reflective and less expressive.   
  
Also, judging by the girl's own slightly torqued disposition these past few days, it was hardly unwise of the boy to exercise a bit of caution. His injuries were enough as they were. He didn't need them added to or complicated any further.  
  
Touji didn't know if he ought to feel lucky to have come away from his own foray in to the land of eva with a broken right leg, a concussion that required regular check ups, and a broken right forearm with multiple broken fingers on that hand. But he did, and he had ever since he'd first woke up in the hospital.  
  
Despite Kensuke's well meant claims attesting to the "coolness" of the thing; the state of the art, tricked out, fancy shmancy wheelchair granted him by the technical geniuses at Nerv upon his discharge, afforded Touji a near poetic appreciation of the simplicity and grace of two legs walking in parallel synchronous motion.   
  
The simplicity that had marked his life for as long as he could remember.  
  
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At school, Asuka had initially wondered if the First Children would ever dispute her claims as to the Third's whereabouts whenever she had to cover for him. Not that she thought Ayanami would tell the truth about Shinji's disappearance, she knew it was classified and Ayanami was loathe to defy any kind of order or protocol. Heaven forbid. But she had always wondered if the albino would blunder it up by offering some cryptic half truth in the case that she had not been implicitly ordered to lie.  
  
But Ayanami had never offered anything, cryptic or otherwise, to those who asked such things of her. Her thorough iciness discouraging the petitioners of the information so effectively that Asuka was almost impressed with the girl's technique. If only it were anything but the girl's whole of a personality and there were something more there besides a uselessly stoic bitch without a will to call her own.   
  
Ayanami had been another source of increased annoyance these days. She saw her in school, though that required no real acknowledgment, but then at the synch tests she was often left to periods of time with nothing but the presence 'if anyone could call it that' of the red eyed wallflower.  
  
Ayanami had surprised her once, quite recently in the locker rooms as they waited for the green light to enter the testing chamber.   
  
***************************************  
  
"Do you feel Ikari-kun's absence?"  
  
Asuka had to pause in a moment of surprise at the silence being broken at the other girl's initiative, and with such a stupid question too.  
  
"Bah, Shinji? We're better off without his inept little show-off antics; tripping over his power chord or getting swallowed up in some black hole."  
  
Asuka had been sitting on the bench leaning back against the locker doors, not looking in Ayanami's direction but she spared a sidelong glance to see if there was any response forthcoming from the girl. Ayanami was facing in her direction, but Asuka didn't feel the distinctive weight of those red eyes on her. Asuka turned her head, lazily, looking to see what had the other girl's attention. All that was there was the old blank expanse of the curtain dividing them from the side Shinji had normally occupied during these times.  
  
"What? The little doll miss her little boy? Nobody to play with you and pull your string to try to make you talk?" 'never mind that she had started the conversation here.'  
  
Asuka stood and walked over to the divider, throwing it open, she crossed over to Shinji's side. She took an overly appraising look around that side of the locker room, then sat down in a huff on the bench that Shinji normally would sit on. She sat, facing Ayanami back on the other side, crossing her arms and legs, a defiant smirk gracing her face.  
  
"You know, I don't think this room misses the baka either."  
  
  
  
Since then, Asuka had continued to use that side of the locker rooms, with the curtain divider drawn closed again.   
  
Ayanami had found that practice to be...distressful for the distraction it caused her to think of that during the tests.   
  
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"Weather today looks to be pleasant; mostly clear skies with high clouds and mild temperatures around 20 degrees with a light breeze coming in from the northwest. An area of cold air sitting off to the west of us might bring rain with it for the weekend, but nothing severe."  
  
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Walking to school as she had been for weeks now, Asuka was feeling grossly chipper. The recovery operation was to finally happen tomorrow. The anticipation brought a smile to her lips, and an itch to her palms. The air was bright and cooled the back of her throat when she breathed deeply. She yawned a bit as well.  
  
When she had opened the door of her bed room and stepped out into the apartment this morning, Misato wasn't there; no surprise there really, and Asuka convinced herself she felt nothing for it, one way or another. Getting a drink from the kitchen after she'd bathed and dressed herself, Asuka noticed a light blinking on the phone, indicating a message.   
  
So whoever it was had left a message when they'd called at the obscene hour of around two 'o clock last night, or this morning technically.  
Asuka hadn't been asleep when it rang, but she wasn't about to answer the phone at that hour, who knew what kind of a creep it would be calling like that.   
  
And if it were anybody else, she didn't want them to know she'd been awake.  
  
Tilting her head back, letting the cool drink fill and flow down her throat, she kept her eyes on the blinking light of the phone. She disliked the things; answering machines. They always seemed so incessantly pleading with their little passive aggressive blinking lights. 'Listen to me listen to me, I have something important to say.'   
The idea of the little machines acquiring some sort of self worth as the mere voice box proxy through which people had to speak and relay their messages just seemed to dig at the skin beneath her fingernails. She wished she could excise the feeling just by flicking the things from their inanimate high horse.  
  
The phone had started ringing again.  
  
She considered answering it, with the empty glass still raised to her lips, little beads of liquid crawling intermittently down the sides of the cup, following the incline towards her parted lips.  
She set the glass down, absently licking at the taste on her lips, and looked at her watch, deciding to let the answering machine have all the glory this day and take care of the call itself, she walked out of the kitchen to get her bag. She was leaving for school.  
  
It was on the way there that she remembered what day it was, and what tomorrow meant. Again, she yawned, and again, she smiled.  
  
She'd let the doctors have their turn with Shinji once he got back; scribbling their little notes, poking and prodding him to find out if he was animal, mineral, or vegetable.   
Or just plain stupid.   
She'd let Misato cry and snivel over her little boy and wrap him up in all her little misguided, malformed maternal instincts. Nursing his little ego so she could keep him coming back for more every time he stepped outside into the rest of the world where it was all so obvious to anyone with any intelligence that he was nothing.   
  
He was lucky she'd been as forgiving of his sad little half-hearted existence as she had up to that point.  
  
But after that, after they'd all had their turn with him, she, Souryu Asuka Langely, would step forward; letting her shadow fall like concentrated gravity around him so that he might get used to the idea of being in it from now on, and she would let him know; no matter what all these other people said they thought of him, no matter how they praised him or worried over him and said that they'd missed him, that she would never let him best her again, and that she, the only one smart enough to have an opinion that mattered, knew him for what he really was.   
  
Yes, today would be good day; on the threshold of returning things back to their natural order in this corner of the universe, not even the depressed idiocy of her classmates would discolor it for her.  
  
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"Kensuke"  
  
Without looking up from his laptop, "Unh."  
  
Seated in his wheelchair at his usual place at the back of the class, with his foot in it's cast propped up, Touji spoke again after the last of the students had filed out for lunch to the cafeteria or outside and after he had spared a glance to Hikari on her way out, indicating his wish to eat alone today. She understood and went on, thinking on how to use this chance to get to the bottom of her other friend's strangely bright mood, and hoping it might be one thing in particular.   
  
Leaning back against the padding of his seat; stretching in the now open space of solitude he shared with his co-conspirator. "Anything new?"  
  
"No." Kensuke answered after a brief delay as he typed one more line into his computer. He sighed and leaned back in his chair, reversing the unhealthy curve his vertebrae had been taking on.   
"Nothing new, just confirming some old bits of info here and there, nothing that answers any questions though." Kensuke stayed in his chair like that, leaning backwards, staring at the ceiling. The room's lights reflecting in his glasses.  
  
"You think he's dead?"   
  
It wasn't a new question to either of them, and one that they only ever ventured when away from the sensitive ears of the class rep. Rather than becoming easier to say with practice, as was usually the case for most anything else, the question just seemed to become thicker and thicker on the tongue with each utterance.  
  
Even harder, these days, was answering it.  
  
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"So, really, what's got you all so happy today?"  
  
"Oh nothing much, just got a good phone call this morning that I'd been waiting for for a while."  
  
"Really," Setting her bento on her lap while she handed the other, Touji's, to her friend. "who was it?"  
  
"Just an old friend from back in Germany. I might be able to see them soon so I'm looking forward to that if it happens."   
  
"Oh."  
  
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The 31st day  
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Misato was underwater, she had been since that day a month ago. Around her, swam schools of fishes, expelling bubbles of techno-babble that frothed about her and up over her head. She kept her eyes fixed ahead, her focus resting on the image of Unit 01 on the main screen.  
  
The Unit's entry plug was partially ejected, with the hatch visible. There was a mess of cable and wires interwoven between the plug, the body of Unit 01, and the multitudes of monitoring stations set up on the catwalk around the eva. Each line an integral component of the net they were casting out into fathomless waters to catch the one small fish that had got away.  
  
There were three sub windows set into the the main view. Two of those were Asuka and Ayanami; Ayanami impassive as ever, looking straight ahead, through the camera and right back at Misato; and Asuka, her head propped up on one hand, looking off to the side. Asuka's demeanor was not the one of flaming annoyance Misato had fully expected, the girls had been sitting tight in their plugs for more than 3 hours. Asuka's expression was sour, but it was the dour look of heavy concentration, not haughty impatience. She was waiting, waiting with great expectation, and she seemed to be heavily invested in that process.   
  
Misato couldn't see it, but in Asuka's view, in a window set off to the side of the cockpit, she was staring at the image of Unit 01 and it's entry plug.  
  
It pained Misato to see Asuka like this, and her professional scowl took on a more melancholy air. It had been so long since Misato had seen anything resembling a pleasant expression on the girl's face. Her contact with Asuka had for the most part been limited the role of "the Major" watching the pilot for hours onscreen during the synch tests. Every attempt she'd made for the past month to make some time with her had ended either in a broken promise, a cold shoulder, an argument, or an unanswered phone. Misato had been carrying a heavy pocket-full of regret that had just continued to grow with the accumulated mass of the lint from her uniform over the past few weeks.  
  
As much as Misato wanted the boy back for her own peace of mind, she sincerely hoped that his return would bring some levity back to their home, and bring some bit of a smile, however mischievous, back to Asuka in particular.  
  
The third window in the view screen was the empty cockpit of Unit 01.   
  
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ten years later, the daughter would fail as well  
***************************************  
  
After a few long breaths spent staring in silence at the image of Misato crying on the walkway in front of Unit 01 and hearing Misato's outraged cries against herself and her science, Ritsuko swallowed hard to fight back the crack that was threatening to develop in her voice. She dictated her orders to Maya and the recovery team without looking away.  
  
"Close down the fifth and sixth channels. Get a sample of the spilled LCL. we need to see if there was any change in it's composition"   
Though she wondered to herself 'why'. The bottom line today was that they had failed in their objective, and there was nothing her mind could imagine to reverse that.   
It was as much a failure as it had been those ten years ago. Science had not come so far in that time.  
  
Ritsuko's frustration was multi-tiered. Her pride as a scientist was shaken. Her heart as a human being, watching, helpless, as another human being's life seemingly slipped through her fingers, stung her in places she had thought numb and withered away from neglect. Finally, though she let none of these feelings show through, her regret ran deepest and most potent at seeing her friend, Misato, like this. The image on screen, branding itself into her mind's eye.   
  
She would see it in her sleep.  
  
Ritsuko finally allowed herself to shift her gaze to see the expressions of the pilots in the two smaller windows on the main screen.  
  
Ayanami. To one who had seen what little the girl had to offer in the way of expression during her secret outings concerning Rei and the Dummy Plug System, the shock was plain on her face. But there was another expression there, on her face, in her eyes. One that she could not quite discern, but very likely thought it could be the beginnings of fear.  
  
'About time she learned the meaning of the word' she thought bitterly to herself before she had a chance to refuse the emotion.  
  
Asuka. She wore her expressions more vividly and with much more splendor than her teammate. She too, bore shock plainly on her face. But there was more there, anger, disappointment, sadness, madness. Asuka wasn't looking ahead, and was instead watching something off screen. She was probably observing Misato on the catwalk through another window. Her lips were moving inaudibly, or perhaps audibly, Ritsuko couldn't tell, she wasn't really listening to know if the girl was saying anything.   
  
Ritsuko at last looked away, deciding that she needed to occupy herself with any of the more technical, less personal, details that still needed resolving.   
  
As she turned, putting her back to the main viewscreen, the image in Asuka's subwindow jerked violently as she ejected her plug from her eva and began to make her way, on her own, from the cockpit.   
  
***************************************  
  
"Misato!"  
  
Calling out, none too gently, to the sobbing form collapsed on the floor, Asuka marched forward with clenched fists. She passed by nervous techs who had just begun to move sluggishly around their stations, as if just waking from a dream where success was a certainty, science was their good and just god, and everything generally came up roses. She reached down and grabbed a handful of Misato's hair jerking her head up so that they would be face to face, but Asuka found herself still shut out as Misato had her eyes shut tight, unwilling to let anything in while letting the tears out all the same. Misato's face was screwed in unfettered anguish. Drops LCL falling from Asuka onto her face mingled with the fountain of tears squeezed from the older woman's eye sockets. Misato had already been kneeling in a pool of the LCL expelled from Shinji's entry plug and the scent of blood and tears was becoming powerful.  
  
With LCL dripping from her hair and off her now quivering upper lip, Asuka yelled again, directly into Misato's face.  
  
"MISATO, Get UP!!!"  
  
But Misato's kept her eyelids firmly pressed and made no move to get up off the floor, defying this harsh reality to draw her back into it's thrall. Her worst fear for the past month had been realized this instant despite the whole of Nerv's best efforts.   
Her lips were sealed shut. A low strangled whine, the only sound her body could generate, was wheezing up from deep in her throat.   
Veins and tendon were visibly protruding from her neck, her body straining beyond its threshold. The stress was approaching critical mass, creating a black hole that opened up inside her ribcage, right between her heart and spine.   
  
Asuka had come over to Misato to get the woman on her feet. To get her up off the floor of the catwalk in front of Unit 01. To stop crying. To get her to let go of the death grip she had on Shinji's limp plug suit like some used up rag doll.  
  
To get her to open her fucking eyes and look at her.  
  
All of Asuka's old hard-wired programming codes concerning people, trust, dependence, and identity were up and running now, automating her thought processes with silicon efficiency.  
  
Shinji was gone.   
So get up.  
They'd lived without him for a month. Now they just had to continue living without him, and finally get out from under the shadow of the hopes that he was somehow coming back into their lives.   
They could finally get on with their fucking lives because they didn't have to worry about him anymore. This was practically a good thing.  
He was done.   
He was gone.   
  
Dead?  
That she didn't know for sure, but in her experience, gone was just as good as dead. Maybe a bit worse.  
  
If he wasn't coming back to them, Fuck him. They didn't need him.  
They should cleanup this mess and make a fresh start then from this point.  
Unplug all this garbage, put Unit 01, the fucking monster, away in some massive closet, and focus on what they had at hand. Namely her.   
  
All along she'd said Shinji was a baka, and now this had just finally proven that he really was too stupid to even get himself saved.  
  
Asuka called out to Misato once again, shaking her forcibly by her hold on the Major's hair. However cold Asuka had meant to be, the woman's hysterics were unnerving. Asuka could feel the threads knitting together her hastily assembled semblance of composure beginning to pop from their seams.   
She attempted to force some reason, some rational thought, back to the forefront of her mind with little success. Her frustration becoming more and more consuming as her emotions defiantly swelled perilously close to the zenith.   
When she spoke, her voice came out level but husky with repression. The syllables slurred and stretched exaggeratedly as each part threatened to break out into a full-on scream of her own. She fought the urge down, willing each syllable to cohesion.  
  
"Miii-saaa-toooooooo geeet UUUUUUPPPPPP!!!!"  
  
Asuka's free hand unconsciously reared back, the stress of the anticlimax breaking her down. Her heart had undergone too many drastic fluctuations too quickly; going from hot to cold to hot again, the thermal expansion and contraction damaging her structural integrity. She became distantly aware of her hand in the air poised to lash out and resolved herself to it a moment before she began her swing. She was prepared to just slap Misato, to let the sting of skin on skin break her out of her pathetic grief, but in the breadth of time separating 'if' from 'then', Misato's eyes opened and Asuka's open hand, already in motion, closed into a fist.  
  
***************************************  
  
"Is this the payoff on the gamble you envisioned it would be, Ikari?" There was more than a little anger in the tone of voice, but it was held in check by a level of reserved uncertainty. The man addressed was ever one to defy convention, including conventional decency.   
  
Standing from his position at the command tower, Ikari Gendou turned his back on drama playing out on the main view screen and was headed towards the exit. Unexpectedly, he spared his second in command a reply, as he adjusted his glasses, which had slipped.  
  
"We will make adjustments."   
  
With that, he dropped his hand from his face, letting it fall, somewhat reluctantly, back to his side, and exited the command room.  
  
It was impossible to see, through the ever present white gloves, the white knuckles contained therein.  
  
***************************************  
  
Hours later, what was done was done.  
  
Independently of each other, neither Misato nor Asuka found they could return to the apartment that night, and so each spent the night curled up in their own separate corners of Nerv underground. Exhaustion not able to coax either of them into sleep.  
  
  
  
***************************************  
to be continued.  
  
  
  
Author's notes: ..........  
  
  
ok thanks  
d  
idward@mac.com


	2. Borderline Ego 2.00

Disclaimer / Intro:  
All characters etc. property of Gainax .......rob a man of his fish, and he'll starve for a day, teach him how to steal and he'll eat forever.   
  
  
  
Ah well  
  
***************************************  
Borderline Ego 2.00 (or "Follow the yellow brick road")  
***************************************  
  
  
After having been forcibly separated my four very surprised techs out on the catwalk. Asuka and Misato had not spoken a word to eachother. Not as the techs dragged them away from each other, not when they passed each other in the hallway, pacing outside the eva cages, despite instructions by a very mussed Ritsuko to sit still and away from each other for the time being until she could get away from the bridge to deal with them herself. The two of them had not opened their mouths to each other except at the very onset of their brawl, and then only to scream the other's name, seemingly as the primal issuance of a challenge.  
  
Since then, what was exchanged between the two was much more feral and dangerous in it's simple mindedness.  
  
Hate. Resentment. Contempt. Jealousy.  
  
Blame.  
  
With assassin's accuracy, they aimed and twisted the daggers that they stared at each other, neither one yielding, not to the other's aggression nor to any mercy of their own .  
  
Eventually they were persuaded into occupying separate sections of the facility while they waited for whatever it was that would happen next. Regardless of it's outcome, success or failure, they were still conducting an operation. There was clean up to be done and procedure to follow and as such and being who they were, they could not leave until dismissed. Neither of them argued or resisted, each of them caught up in much the same sentiment: 'Why bother.' and so they let themselves be led through the motions.  
  
After some listening and some nodding on both their parts, more-so on the part of the Major, Asuka was being held largely as a matter of what to do with her for her insubordination, they were each given their leave of duty. Misato had finished her duties, while in Asuka's case, it had simply been decided that it was better to let someone else deal with it at a later time. Care had been taken to ensure that they would not have cause or opportunity to be in each other's presence and that they would each have access to ports of exit far away from each other.   
  
Nevermind that they lived in the same home, where they were supposedly being discharged to.  
  
Released from their roles as Pilot and Major, the women found themselves alight on the casual breeze of ambivalence. Their rice paper thin psyche's caught the drafts of air displaced by the opening and closing of doors and people moving down long halls, the sighs and whispers that permeated the rooms and ventilation system.  
  
They settled, finally, in recessed corners, far removed from any of the trafficked alleyways of Nerv.   
  
The events of the day crept back into their consciousness slowly, like the headlight of an oncoming train. In the face of it, they made no sounds, they shed no tears, their emotions too strong and too conflicted to manifest any other way but through silence.  
  
They both spent the night at Nerv that way, far away from each other and anyone else who might intrude on this; their time of need. They lay there in the dark with their thoughts cycling through the spectrum of human emotions. The kaleidoscope turning at an ever increasing rate until the colors bled and overlapped, crystallizing into a glaring white noise.  
  
***************************************  
  
  
the 32nd day  
***************************************  
  
In the undefinable space that is the utter depths of despair, the encroachment of another human presence was palpable to her like the crawl of sweat on skin.  
  
Misato heard the footsteps coming down on the stairs above her head, the clang of initial contact as hard sole contacted each metal grating platform followed by the creak of shifting weight, and then replayed again.   
Closer and closer.   
She watched through the gaps between each step to see who it might be, having a strong notion already but still somewhat bitterly surprised to see that the woman had, in fact, come out from the sterilizing light of her lab.  
  
Ritsuko's telltale white lab coat passed in front of Misato's view, as the major peered out into the shadows in front of her, and over the crossed arms that she used to hug her body to itself. Upon reaching the bottom of the stairs, Ritsuko stopped still for a moment, without turning, she sat back on the stairs behind her and directly ahead of Misato.   
  
They sat like that for a minute. Front to back  
  
"You've been given the day off, otherwise I'd be here to tell you to get to your office."  
  
Misato made no reply to this.  
  
"You could go home. Section 2 reports that Asuka hasn't been there either." She paused after saying this, turning her head slightly to look behind her, looking for any kind of reaction. "But I'd figured you wouldn't really want to go back there quite yet."  
  
Still nothing from the Major.  
  
Standing up, Ritsuko rounded the corner of the stairway over to the side, looking at Misato, wrapped up in herself on the floor beneath the stairway.   
  
"I have a minute, would you like to go get some coffee.... maybe a drink?"  
  
"Don't tempt me." Finally a response, a deathly cold one, but a response none-the-less.   
  
Ritsuko smiled at this wanly, a small smile for a small victory. She stepped forward, ducking her head beneath the stairway, and reached out her hand to Misato in order to help her from the floor. Ritsuko doubted the woman had moved at all through the night and her muscles and skeleton would be most ungracious in moving from their tightly bound position.  
  
Before moving to take the offered hand, Misato levelled her eyes at her friend.  
  
"What are we going to do now?" Her voice came out evenly, the anger still evident in it though, her brow still cross.  
  
Ritsuko sighed and closed her eyes slowly. "I don't know, nobody really seems to know, not even the Commander." She should not have mentioned that particular person.  
  
"The Commander?!!!" Misato became quite agitated at that. Uncrossing her arms, she made to get up from the floor, but her body was noncompliant, being much too stiff to stand so quickly. She had to stop midway, still steeply hunched over, but at least on her feet.   
  
With her head bowed, she took Ritsuko's hand and let her friend lead her out from under the stair well and out into the tight maintenance hallway she'd been hiding out in. The extra space let her stretch out the length of her frame slowly. Her back was worst of all, her spine issuing a loud crack for every degree of vertical orientation she gained. Her limbs also had taken on the maddening tingle of feeling and circulation returning to appendages long since fallen asleep, even when their host had not. She leaned back against the near wall to stay upright while motor control returned to her.  
  
It took her some moments to regain her composure and prepare herself to walk comfortably. Ritsuko granted her this time without interruption, just standing back against the other wall and watching the unkinking of the springs. While Misato steadied herself, Ritsuko was thinking back on the name that had finally gotten Misato up and active.   
'The Commander. Nobody has seen him since yesterday. He's holed himself up in on of his offices and Vice Vommander Fuyutsuki refuses to disturb him.'  
  
With no small amount of distaste her thoughts turned to a parallel subject, 'Rei seems to have made herself scarce as well.'   
Though it was not really as if anybody had really expended a great deal of energy looking for her. Ritsuko did not doubt that the girl was somewhere within the Commander's immediate reach.   
  
Ritsuko looked over to Misato who was standing away from the wall now and had her heard turned to the side, staring at nothing in particular but the mass of wires, pipes and valves that ran along the walls exposed throughout these parts of Nerv.  
  
From this profile, the bruise on Misato's cheek and around her eye, courtesy of the Pilot's initial strike, was plainly visible. Ritsuko's eyes softened and she stepped away from the wall.  
  
The Major seemed about as ready as she was likely to get.  
  
***************************************  
  
  
  
***************************************  
  
Asuka would have no such company come looking for her, permitting her a considerably much longer time to herself. Ample time to damage herself even further.  
  
Asuka would eventually have to rouse herself up and away from her hiding place among the little known corners and corridors below when she began to hear the sounds of footsteps, indicating that the area was about to become populated again with the returning day shift.   
  
The ants would come crawling through these spaces soon. She had to hide now, before they betrayed her to their queen  
  
She had no intention of letting anyone find her as yet. She would return to them when she felt good and ready; satisfied that they had been duly punished for their mistreatment and neglect of her through these barely sufferable last few weeks. Misato was the worst of all, going all to pieces over that wimp, Baka-Shinji. That jellyfish's incompetence was astounding, getting absorbed into his eva like that. She was three times the pilot that boy ever had the hopes of being.   
  
Shinji  
Misato  
  
There was no doubt in her mind the two of them were fools of the highest order, but still, that was no excuse.  
  
Bah, the wimp was gone. No need to squander her valuable time on him now. She could feel her brain cells atrophying from the sheer boredom of remembering the loser. Now she could finally look forward to letting her natural and hard earned abilities shine. He wouldn't be around to distract her anymore with his pitiful dramatics and she would finally be able to do what she was meant to do unhindered.  
  
With a little discreet wandering, she was now was making her way up through one of the many not oft used passageways in this massive complex. The final destination of which, an unknown to her.  
  
The passageway was long and only barely lit with the minimum lighting. It had a high ceiling allowing the low light projected from the ceiling do diffuse even further. It was wide enough to permit two lanes of traffic so she guessed that it might be some sort of transport route for equipment and supplies. The whole passage was on a notable incline, so she reasoned that she was at least heading towards the surface and would perhaps emerge somewhere in Tokyo 3.  
  
For a good while, the physical exertion played as natural buoy for her thoughts. She embraced it with her being fully, seizing upon its every aspect and facet, not wanting to leave room for any errant thought to enter her mind. From now until she saw daylight, she determined that she would know walking, she would know this tunnel, and know nothing else.   
  
Being thus determined, her attention settled inwards, moving down through layers of fabric and skin, and on deeper into the muscle beneath. She felt the muscles in her thighs and calves tense and relax in their alternating rhythms. Beneath the sheer fabric of her plugsuit, her trim muscles bulged and undulated up and down the length of her limbs. She couldn't help but admire the fine craftsmanship in the construction of her frame.   
With her college level knowledge of human anatomy, she was able to perceive and identify the individual muscles and muscle groups, and for a while she entertained herself with that. This one contracting while this one relaxed and this other one pulling in conjunction with another.   
  
She felt her breathing adjust. Her diaphragm pressing down against her stomach and liver, pushing those things aside to make more space for her lungs to fill. The air rushing in to fill the vacuum that opened up in her chest and then expelled with forceful conviction. Her torso swelling to accommodate the billowing engines of her respiratory system and continuing to supply oxygen to her ever demanding body. The complex system of tissue and physics regulating the exchange of gases through microscopic capillaries.   
She was acutely aware of the warming of the air as it passed through her mouth and nasal cavity with each breath. The way it dried her mucus and saliva and forced her to work her tongue around in the dry hollow well at the back of her throat.  
  
She reveled to feel the rush of all these things, these millions of processes that affirmed her strength and vitality. Her body sustaining itself. Standing and propelling itself forward, under no one's vision, under no one's direction but her own. It gave her an uplifting sense of unbound freedom to go on like this. Walking uphill in an underground fortress.  
  
Her heartbeat.  
Her footsteps.  
Her breath  
The sheer power and determination that was she, Souryu Asuka Langley.   
  
She could feel the taxing of her energy from one step to the next, knowing that she would only have that much less energy for the step after that. But she gave this little concern, confident that she would be free of this place long before her reserves wore out.  
  
To her considerable credit, she went on like this for quite some time, but eventually, she could delve no further into the microcosmos of ribosomes and mitochondrion. She had pared herself down as superficially as she dared and found herself recycling information. This tunnel was considerably longer than she would have thought. The repetition dulling her intellect, her mind numbing from the automation and thus, slackening in it's vigilance.  
  
She didn't even really notice when her thoughts first strayed, as they were just little deviances from the path. Little harmless, idle thoughts without consequence or substance. Something funny Hikari had said once. A nice outfit she saw in a magazine. Simple things that didn't mean much and passed through her mind leaving it no better and no worse. But these were simply the vanguards laying the groundwork to permit passage for their more malevolent brethren. With stalker's craftiness, these thoughts and doubts stole deeper into her mind, gradually shedding their airy guises as snake skins and trespassing further onto lands held taboo.  
  
In time the serpents had her, snapping at her heels, injecting their venom through brittle fangs, the poison spreading quickly.  
  
Misato  
Shinji  
  
She set her teeth against the sound of their names ringing between her ears.  
  
The tunnel turned, rounding a corner sharply and reversing back onto itself while continuing its vertical ascent. Her mind followed suit, snaking back and forth as she ascended one level, then another. Her mind reversing direction evasively, trying to shake the ever increasing weight that trailed her.  
  
She ran for a while, the change in routine giving her some solace from her thoughts, some new thing to be excited by and again her breathing, her heartbeat was all she knew and felt. The power she felt generated within herself was, in itself, invigorating. She ran probably longer and harder than she felt she ever had, again letting the but the fatigue outpaced her, the cramping in her abdomen doubled her over, and she stumbled back into the mire.   
  
Like some perverse game played against a petulant child who refused to lose and so was constantly changing the rules, her emotions continued to flip flop, mocking her as she tried to ascend this jacob's ladder.  
  
Anger  
Grief  
Relief  
Regret  
Pride  
Shame  
Hope  
Doubt  
  
As the dualities persisted, becoming more and more pitched in slope and amplified in vehemence, she rallied against one as much as the other, not fully willing to accept or embrace any side of the emotions caterwauling within her. She shoed them from her head like flies and attempted to stamp them out like small insects invading her bedroom. These things failing, her frustration just continued to mount like dung in a pigsty, attracting more flies in turn  
  
In this solitude, she permitted herself the basest of expressions and behavior. Starting small at first, as if testing her control. Then, finding her peace just continuing to erode, she rushed on into it. Her hands clenched and unclenched at her sides. Her teeth grinding out slurs of German and Japanese in hushed tones that periodically exploded as shouts and bright flashes of disciplinary pain at the back of her dry throat.   
She was becoming dehydrated, at the back of her mind, she knew this.   
Eventually she learned to refrain from such outbursts, but that just made her eyes twitch all the more.  
  
Her frustration bled in and out of the realm panic and drove her to run again in short bursts of adrenaline, only to be curbed again and again by the ever deepening cramps and the weariness in her bones. She was beginning to feel feverish, sweating and flushed as she was. An imaginary tumor in her brain, giving her a headache to the point of nausea. Her bones and joints had a ringing ache in them, like they were made of some tarnished old metal and had been struck to all resonate at some wailing high pitched chord.   
  
Her mind's path began to resemble less the zig zag of the passageway, and more a double helix, as her thoughts multiplied to run parallel as well as in reverse, the points never quite meeting up at either end.  
  
Her perspective and emotional orientation held to no constants, except to find new ways to contradict one another. Driving her one way, then another.  
  
She felt she was suffocating, rolling over and over as she drifted up from the sea floor. It seemed to be just be a matter of which way she would be turned when she eventually reached the surface.  
  
Almost out of exhaustion then, her thoughts seemed to quiet themselves. No longer was she rocking back and forth in a rapidly deflating life raft through some mad storm. A tired quiet just fell all over her, too tired was she then to really even appreciate the peace. She still had a lot of walking to do and her feet hurt, her legs hurt, her muscles all over ached and she had a vicious headache. Her abdomen cramped, she must be hungry.  
  
She kept walking.  
..  
..  
..  
..  
..  
..  
..  
..  
..  
  
She mensed.  
  
"!"  
"WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!"  
  
She wasn't due for her period for another week, but stress can do things to a body.   
  
Hunched over and screaming to herself, clutching, practically clawing at her abdomen, Asuka hated the woman that she was, hated the body that failed her, that made her weak, that defiled and defied her. Spitefully following a design not her own. She wanted to tear the offending organs from her body, cast them off and the phantom baggage that they entailed, taunting and threatening her with their gory testament every month.   
  
She bit down on her lip, daring her eyes to cry. So help her God, if they cried, if they shed one fucking tear, she swore she would tear them out from their sockets herself, flinging them sightlessly against the walls around her. Her body would not defy her in this, she would not dirty herself with tears.   
  
She shut her eyes against the burning, shutting them so tight she thought they might pop. The burning just stayed there, spreading further back in her head.  
  
Sucking her lip, she tasted the blood there and waited until she could hear her breathing turn slow and even. Concentrating on nothing else but the hiss of air flowing purposefully in and out of her, she stood, raised her head, opened her eyes,  
  
and kept walking.  
  
After a few steps, and a few steps more, and a few steps after that, the warmth that had spread down her legs cooled, becoming nothing more that just so much sweat and moisture trapped beneath her airtight suit. The accumulated moisture, sweat and such, from all over her body had all been draining, at gravity's beckoning, down into the shoes of her suit and now squished between her toes. But soon, that too faded into numbness.  
  
***************************************  
  
  
  
***************************************  
  
"Do you think we'll have to reinstate the Fourth Children?"  
  
Through the steam wafting over the rim of her cup, Ritsuko regarded Misato appraisingly for a moment. Seeing where this was going, she sipped from her cup once more before she set the cup down and spoke.  
  
"It's not practical right now."  
  
"Because we don't have an eva for him to pilot?"   
  
The question came out rushed, the prior question put forth only so she could ask this one, and this one so that she could ask the next. All of which she already knew the answers to but Misato had not yet shaken the anger and vulnerability from her system and so felt the need to take control of something, anything. This conversation would have to do for the time being.   
Though she was the head of tactical operations, and a genius at devising innovative methods of attack and defense, she was currently employing one of the oldest and most tried and true forms in the arts of war. It simply involved giving the opponent enough rope to hang themselves.   
  
To her credit, Ritsuko was playing her part well to the bitter end. Anything, well, almost anything for a friend.   
  
"He is not capable of piloting adequately in his present condition."  
  
"Oh, you mean, the condition where we abandoned him then nearly killed him."  
  
Ritsuko sighed resignedly,"From a limited point of view, yes, I suppose you could describe it as that."  
  
"So once he's all healed up and ready to go we'll suit him up and throw him right back in the saddle. Just keep throwing kids at these things (the evas) to chew up and spit out, or not spit out as they seem to have taken to recently?"   
  
Ritsuko opened her her mouth to speak but Misato cut her off.  
  
"And don't give me that 'we must in order to survive' crap. I can take that from someone like the Commander but not you Ritsuko. I want to know why we're still depending on these things if we don't even understand them."  
  
It was an old argument between these two. One that was asked more out of frustration than any expectation of an answer. One that generally ended as this one did now. In silence.  
  
Until the next question.  
  
"Where the hell is Asuka," then as an afterthought "and Rei?"  
  
***************************************  
  
  
  
***************************************  
  
Ayanami was, contrary to what doctor Akagi had previously thought, not with the commander.   
  
She did not know where the Commander was. She had not been contacted by the commander and had not sought him out herself. Deciding that he most likely had other more pressing issues to attend to, she had taken it upon herself to think through this by her own devices.  
  
She too, had felt a need to reflect on the ramifications of this day's events. So, choosing to forego asking the commander to assist her in that endeavor, she had set out to do it, as she did most everything else in her existence not dictated by the commander: in her own way.  
  
Ayanami's path, following the failure of the operation and the spectacle of the Major and Second Children, had diverged from most everyone else's in direction and substance.   
  
She had not ejected from her entry plug until finally ordered to by Doctor Akagi, amidst a flurry of other orders the woman was antiseptically spraying the bridge staff with. Rei had stayed in the plug that long simply as a matter of having no idea as to anything better to do. Until she was ordered otherwise, she had to assume that there might still be some purpose to her presence in eva. When that purpose was dissolved she didn't know what to do.  
  
So much had just changed.  
  
By now, the techs and staff who had originally been stunned to near immobility, were quite active with the urgency of just needing to do something, anything. Most of the personel out on the floor had no clue what the true nature of the operation had been to begin with. Knowing what one was really doing was not in the job descriptions for the majority of Nerv employees. They knew whatever it was, it was important though. The tension and the overtime surrounding the project for these many weeks had made that much clear. Still, for the most part, their understanding of the operation consisted only of making these preparations this day, moving this over there another day and then today, finally, everything coming to a head with a series of orders concerning making connections from this to that and raising the level on this other thing. After some time, they had simply heard that whatever it is they had set out to do had been a less than successful, and that was enough to warrant uncertainty about their chances of seeing tomorrow.   
  
It was their general understanding that with the position Nerv was in, failure at anything was not a good thing for the human race.  
  
Ayanami stood motionless outside her entry plug after she had finally received the order to eject. She stood by, watching the people's motions off in the far section of the cages allotted to Unit 01 though she knew their actions really ought not to be any of her concern. Feeling the weight of the LCL accumulate, surpass the threshold of it's surface tension, fall away, and then build up once again as drops of the stuff fell from her eyelashes down to the pool bleeding out beneath her, she stepped down from the pilot's docking platform and began walking.   
  
She approached the techs, who busily pressed by her, carrying equipment and relaying instructions here and there. They were removing some of the lines and attachments surrounding Unit 01 and it's entry plug, as if dressing it down, though they left some parts alone. She began making her way over towards the eva, oddly concerned with having a closer look at the thing.   
  
Standing before its gargantuan form, directly in front of the exposed core, she stared up at it, feeling suitably small and insignificant against the eva's size and level of activity surrounding her.   
  
She kept her eyes raised up towards its shielded face, though it held it's gaze determinedly fixed forward, over her head, and avoiding eye contact. Ayanami knew roughly what the Eva's looked like stripped of their armor and bindings. She could imagine, in her own mind's eye, peering beneath the mask, at the face beneath. The thing's eyes, the thing's teeth. But her imagination could pierce no further, her vision falling short of that which she was seeking to discover.  
  
'What is it, inside the eva, beneath the skin, beneath the tissue?'  
  
She had felt the eva's mind, she had always felt it's presence there, with eyes trained on the back of her head, waiting for her there in the entry plug. Ever since she had first begun her training in the prototype model, she had known that she was not the sole presence in that space, but that she was, without question, alone in that seat.   
  
That phantom presence there inside the eva, it would allow her to come into it's space, granting her permission to guide that enormous body under her direction, but it would share nothing of itself with her. Instead, it would only reflect herself back at her, and that reflection redoubled again, through an unending chain of mirrors . The images of her other selves always a moment ahead of her in time, always acting out some scenario she might choose to persue, and showing her beforehand, the futility of it, whatever it was.  
  
Having felt that same sense of a presence, though with an entirely different identity, inside the plug of Unit 01, she knew that Shinji was not alone in whatever space he resided in.  
  
Still, she wondered at that location. If it was someplace corporeal, with dimension and consequence, or someplace else, like the place from which her young imagination sprung.  
  
'Where is Ikari-kun in this?'   
  
Her eyes fell level in front of her, appraising her warped reflection in the silent core. Her image in red, with her head swollen, the surrounding environment wrapping around her in the almost all-seeing, 180 degree, fish-eye reflection. If the image there were to be taken as a literall representation, and not for what it was, it appeared her neck would be be snapped under the weight of her own cranium. Her body would then probably tumble headlong from the catwalk onto the cage floor, so far below.  
  
She looked down at her own body, her real body, outside of the unbelievably distorted reflection on the surface of this cloned Angel's heart.  
  
The cages were well lit and the light from the room was reflected from the core back onto Ayanami. The reflected light taking on the hue of the core's smooth mirror surface. Her white suit was cast in the red glow. She brought her hands up looking at them carefully. They were there, her hands, slick with LCL, and gloved in white, yet appearing stained red in this abominable red light.  
  
While she considered this, the LCL, smelling of blood, continued to dry on her face, a few fresh trails of it still seeping down from her hair and over her passive features.  
  
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Finally, she saw that light at the end of the tunnel, not a very bright light, but a light all the same. As she continued to make her way towards it, she was able to make out that it was a lone spotlight, directed against the closed gate at the end of the tunnel. The gate had stencilled on it, in big, bold, unimaginative type, GATE 52. To the left side of the gate, there was a much smaller light.   
It blinked, slowly transitioning from non-existent to red   
  
The light to the side its slow pulse, fading in and out like the waxing and waning of the moon played in accelerated time lapse, ticking off the ebb and flow of some red sea, eroding the shoreline of the small island she dwelt hibernating upon. Distantly, it reminded her of her heartbe- no, of breathing, of her own tired breathing.   
  
Inhale  
......  
Exhale  
......  
  
In synch to the light's pulse, breath by breath, the her mind engaged. Her awareness tentatively expanding beyond the borders of the cold, tight egg she had been slumbering in. The transparent membrane, both confining and protecting her through this gestation, gave way and she reached out to again touch the thresholds of her identity.   
  
Her breath, her footsteps, her heartbeat, her pulse, her.......  
  
Her senses again began to register those certain elements of her condition and environment. Only certain elements though. Some things were kept mercifully submerged at the bottom of a deep rift in her unconsciousness. It was a small blessing.   
  
She realized she had never washed since emerging from her entry plug after the test the day before. How odd for her. Her hair was crusted and pressed to her forehead and cheeks. Her skin feeling tight and sticky all over where it was not already covered by her plug suit. Even the suit's normally sleek and comfortably body hugging enclosure was beginning to chafe with the salt from her sweat building up in deposits around her joints. Her legs and feet were abused with fatigue and ripe blisters. She smelled pungently of sweat and blood. Her abdomen felt hollow, barely there, forgotten.  
  
Blinking, she noticed how sticky her eyelashes were as well as the thick encrustation that surrounded her eyes.  
Her lips were chewed on and sore and very, very dry.  
  
As she approached the exit, she parted those lips just a moment , as if testing their usability, before gingerly speaking to herself,  
  
"You.....baka."  
  
Almost upon the gate, Asuka guessed that the red light was the LED on the gate's keypass, indicating it's locked status. A Nerv security card would be needed to gain passage through here. Fortunately, as sleek as the plugsuits were, they had been designed with a few inserts that served as pocket space, allowing the Children to carry their ID cards around Nerv while suited up, but precious little else.   
  
Then, the last step taken, she found herself there, at the end. She continued to breathe, letting the slight excitement at finally reaching the end fade. She held out her Nerv card, pressed between clammy fingertips gloved in the clinging embrace of her red plug suit. The keypass just inches from her. All it would take was a simple downward slashing motion, and she would be free.   
  
The simple red light droning on.   
  
Her cracked lips curled into a tight smile, knowing that on the other side was the welcome end to this, and swiped her card through. The blinking red light flashed green and with the pitched whine of mechanics, the gate began ascending up along its runners, folding up and out of the way. On the floor, Asuka could see a line of amber light, it's front expanding further back along the floor into the half lit tunnel and up her body, as the gate made way for the light of the setting sun to come through.  
  
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"I can't believe this, I don't believe this is happening."   
  
Following the failed salvage operation, Makoto Hyuuga had spoken these words into his lap as he held his head bowed, his forehead resting on his hands clutched together. It was a redundant statement, but it might have somehow given him and many of the others on the bridge staff some measure of comfort to say such things aloud. Perhaps just speaking, and hearing one's voice in doing so, gave some level of grounding, an assurance that as bad as whatever the situation happened to be, at least they still had themselves.   
  
At least they were still alive.   
  
But Makoto wouldn't want to think of it that way: that he said these things just to make himself feel better, not consciously, of course, and he wouldn't want any of his fellows to think of it that way so he said nothing of that odd notion to anyone else. He had just continued to keep his head down and give voice to the irrelevant.   
  
"I can't believe we lost him."  
  
'Him' the Third Children, Pilot Ikari, and if he were off duty, Ikari Shinji, or even Shinji-kun, Makoto didn't really know the boy any other way but in name only. It was not a direct personal loss for him. Indirectly, it had plucked dissonantly at his heartstrings, watching the breakdown of Major Katsuragi while he sat ineffectually in the background at his station.  
  
And it was there that he sat again, his head again held in his hands. This time his concern encompassing all the Children, the remaining Children that is.  
  
Earlier that day, after reporting to work early after minimal rest at home, he had received orders from Major Katsuragi to locate the two remaining pilots. Since then, neither of them had turned up in a days worth of searching. No reports from Section 2 had been forthcoming to that end and searching the security videos from the previous day had been a nightmare. There was plenty at Nerv to be secure about and they had the surveillance cams to prove it.  
  
Currently he had no Children found for his efforts. Though he was tired, he was far from given up on the task. he just needed a moment to collect himself and rest his eyes.  
  
A beeping beneath his right elbow alerted him that something was afoot, and when he checked it, then checked it again after bolting from his seat to give her the news in person, he was greatly relieved.   
  
At last he'd have something good to report to her, and he wanted to at least see the smile personally. It would ease his mind.  
  
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Hikari , Kensuke, and Touji were out for a stroll. Touji still confined to the wheel chair, Hikari, keeping pace by his side with her arms held behind her back, Kensuke some distance ahead of them, walking with his hands in his pockets and his eyes focused on the horizon off to his side. They had done this once before, a few days after Touji had been back to school. Today they took the opportunity to do it again, after having had another lengthy discussion after the final bell had rung.   
  
Having already talked about much of what weighed heaviest on their minds - their friends, the pilots - all of whom had been absent from school today, they were taking this time now outdoors to enjoy some solace in the quiet and tranquility that still persisted, if one knew when and where to look, here in the city.   
  
Kensuke had shown them this place, it had been one of his old favorites. He'd shared this place with Shinji once as well. It had been before they were really even friends. His only contact with Shinji up to then was as the slightly apologetic sidekick to the violence prone jock. And then as the stupid kid he'd had to save whilst fending off an Angel.   
To himself, he smiled at that a bit wanly. His fascination with all things military, and eva in particular, not really having been discarded, he did feel he had a tragically more realistic and personal mentality towards it now. It was still just a matter of how one used the tools, he'd always at least had the sense to know that. It was just that he'd been in a position now to see them used to protect to great effect, but also to attack, to terrible detriment, his friends.  
  
He had been glad for the ruggedness and versatility of Touji's state of the art wheel chair. The technology there showing it's utility for the benefit of others. Otherwise Touji would not have been able to navigate the uneven terrain of the hills.  
  
Their discussion at school had been lengthy. And at times, heated, leaving them not for want of talk and mentally exhausted. Still, idly, they found some things to talk about.  
  
"My sister's s'posed to get fitted for some new prototype model of prosthetics next week. They said alot of the new grafts are takin hold real well, a lot better than what they were tryin to do at the other place."   
  
Hikari nodded, still just looking straight ahead, as was Touji. She offered an economical but polite "Hm." to let him know she heard. A calm smile on her lips.  
  
Touji smiled wide, continuing his story, "Yeah, the new therapist she got says she oughta be able to adjust real easy, bein so young an all." That last bit made his smile fall a bit, and Hikari noticed, glancing down at him, but he rebounded, saying: "The Suzuharas ain't no quitters, that's for sure. She'll do fine."   
  
Hikari smiled and closed her eyes, relieved that he seemed genuinely hopeful.  
"She's had a good role model for that." She'd surprised herself, saying that out loud. When she opened her eyes again somewhat embarrassed, Touji was looking up at her, a hitherto unimaginable look of quiet gratitude on his face.   
It was an unusual, but not totally uncomfortable gesture.   
  
Touji had meant to make some remark to the effect of, 'Yeah, well don't let it get out, you know.' but had decided against it, choosing instead, the expression he wore.  
  
Hikari couldn't yet defy the blush lighting her cheeks slightly at the look from the boy, and turned her head down and away, but she went on, saying: "Yeah, you've done a good job too, Suzuhara-kun.".   
  
The words of praise were meant to encompass more than just his perseverance since the incident, but everything that had led up to it as well, though much of that she did not personally know in detail. It was a generalization based on what she did know of her classmate of many years' behavior.  
  
She raised her head and again set her eyes ahead, trying to be casual about it. Her smile, though, was vivid, celebratory.  
  
It was enough to keep walking like that for a while.  
  
With as good a mood as they were in now, Touji ventured a question that, while not melancholy, had the potential to turn out that way. But his thoughts had turned to the subject, and he felt he owed his friend as much to voice his thanks now, and to share that particular little story with the class rep.  
  
"Did I ever tell you about when Shinji came to see my sister?"  
  
Hikari couldn't hide her surprise. Her eyebrows raised and her smile turned lopsided, questioning. Turning her head, she looked to Touji to elaborate.  
  
"Really, Shinji? When did he do that?"   
  
Though she was surprised to hear that Shinji had visited Touji's sister in the hospital, and probably sounded incredulous, she was really quite happy to hear it. It spoke of no small change in the boy to know he'd gone to see the girl he had inadvertently injured on his first sortie. She knew Shinji to be one who carried his guilt with him. She saw his shoulders sagging with the weight of it more and more every day that he entered the classroom. In all this time, he still seemed only marginally able to accept Touji's forgiveness and subsequent friendship, though she knew it meant a lot to him.  
  
Touji continued after a moment, amused at Hikari's reaction, though he couldn't blame her, and also needing a moment to collect his own thoughts. He'd have to go back a ways in order to show her why the Shinji he knew would do that.  
  
"It was just before my test." It was a small victory that he did not stumble over that last word. That small accomplishment raising his confidence in regards to his choice to tell her the story.   
  
"Back when I had to deliver those papers to Ayanami's."   
Hikari flushed briefly with the memory wherein she had all but begged Touji to let her accompany him to the absentee pilot's place, only to have him offhandedly ask Shinji to come along instead.   
Touji seemed to pause a little bit in his recounting as well, before starting up again, somewhat awkwardly after having such a good start.  
  
"Well, yeah, when we had to go by there to drop off her papers for her, she wasn't even there when we arrived. So Shinji, he just went ahead and went on in." Hikari let a small gasp escape, shocked at the forwardness of such a move. "Then, when we got inside, I noticed just how filthy everything was. Have you ever been there?" Hikari shook her head no. "Well it was fuckin filthy. Dirt, and trash, and bandages, all these old bloody bandages just layin 'round on the floor. It was sick. She doesn't even have anythin in her whole apartment but, like, a bed and a desk. No T.V. or nothin, and she lives in just the shittiest part of town. All run down and noisy. Like a prison almost."   
  
Touji trailed off, after having become agitated and a little withdrawn throughout his description of Ayanami's living space. The beginnings of anger lining his eyes, but then dissolving a bit as he came back to himself.   
  
Ahead of them, Kensuke had stopped walking and was turned towards the sunset, hands still in his pockets, his glasses reflecting the sun's glare. Touji and Hikari were coming up on him shortly.  
  
"Anyways," Touji continued, much calmer now and sidling up beside Kensuke with Hikari still beside him. "I was gonna just drop off the papers an leave, cause well, that's all we were s'posed to do. But Shinji went and got a trash bag and started cleaning the place up." Touij smiled to himself a bit, reflecting. "I teased him about it, cleaning up a woman's place an' all but...."   
  
and again he trailed off, this being the turning point of his story up to now, and the part he needed to make sure that he expressed just as best he could. The part he'd sat and mulled over in the school yard when he thought his life as a normal kid was over.  
He stared at the horizon, his thoughts spreading themselves out on that expansive plane for him to be able to sort through and organize and finally give substance to.  
  
"Well, I told him I thought he'd changed. How I used to think he was a jerk and just self centered. But seein him try to do somethin good for someone like Ayanami, who probably wouldn't even notice, I just figured he'd changed. Like, maybe he could try to, and maybe he even that he wanted to be able to take care of somebody b'sides just himself."  
  
The sun continued to descend towards the horizon and out of sight, the palette of the sky continuing to shift through the spectrum.  
  
"Then Ayanami came in. Shinji explained and we left. On the way home, he was real quiet. So I asked him what's up, an he asked me 'Do you think someone like her has reason to say arigatou to someone much in her life?'   
  
The sun stopped to ponder that one a moment as well.  
  
"I hadn't heard her say anythin but I guess she did. Shinji was closer to her an she talks soft most the time anyway, but I didn't feel like teasin him about it an so I told him, 'no, she probly didn't', an he just sort of smiled about it then."  
  
The three of them smiled then, sharing that image.   
  
"Then the next day, when I found out they wanted me to pilot.... I don't know, I was just really messed up. I figured I could get them to take care of my sister in exchange for me agreein to pilot, an I was happy for that much I guess...." He stopped again, looking for the right words again, somewhat surprised at himself for carrying on the story this long.   
  
"It's not like I knew any of this was gonna happen to me, but I guess I did kind of get the feeling that, you know, this might be it. Maybe not that I was gonna die pilotin eva, but that I wasn't gonna be just a kid anymore, I wasn't gonna be able to be just my little sister's big brother anymore. I was a pilot now. I was gonna be just like Shinji."  
  
Kensuke lowered his eyes, careful not to move his head, over to look down at his friend confined to the wheel chair. Some guilt still in him that he had ever felt spitefully envious of his friend to have been selected to be an eva pilot, to be 'just like Shinji', and more guilt still, that he had felt relief when it had not been him at the end of the day.  
  
Touji looked down to his arm, bandaged and braced to his body. His hand exposed beyond the cast but bound with his fingers splayed out with tiny pins inserted through his skin on into the bone fragments below, holding them in place until they mended. That hand he'd used to attack Shinji with not once, but twice.  
  
"I was thinkin bout Shinji alot 'cause of that, not so much the first day after they told me, but that second day, I was thinkin about him alot an why he pilots. He's my friend, so I'm not sayin this to be mean or nothin, but he's a pretty weak little guy. It's obvious he hates fightin an pilotin is just harder. Kensuke an me were with him when he fought that second Angel."  
He looked over in an attempt to meet Aida's eyes with that, feeling a need to make some contact with him, but he couldn't be sure he'd made it through the glare that almost seemed ever present on the spectacled boy's glasses.  
  
"Ken an me saw him, he was practically bein tortured, ridin in that thing. Then I thought about seein him at Ayanami's. Tryin to do somethin for her when he didn't really have to, and nobody really seemed to care. She always seems so weird and out of it, I didn't think she was really even gonna care. But I guess, I mean, she said 'thank you'. Comin from Ayanami, that means somethin. I don't know if that's why he pilots really, to have people thank him, but I thought at least he does really seem to care about people. Like, if he could help them that he'd probly try to do what he could.  
  
So eventually, I told him about it, about me bein an eva pilot."  
  
He took a deep breath at that, his recount coming to a bit a lul. It seemed Touji needed a moment and was giving dramatic enough pause to let it sink in, just how hard it had been to tell Shinji, to let himself tell Shinji. That moment had been like the last moment of quiet stillness atop the first hill on a roller coaster before gravity took hold and sent them careening through the course of events that followed.   
  
Hikari, not wanting to seem like she was standing over him, waiting for him to finish the story, adjusted her skirt to allow her to crouch down, careful to keep her knees together. Browsing the selection of tall, unkept blades of grass at her feet, she plucked one up, turning it over between her fingers in the tinted sunlight.  
  
"Actually, I probly only decided to tell him cause of Ayanami again. I wasn't gonna tell him at first 'cause I knew it would probly freak him out. I was already pretty weirded out and I didn't want him being all scared an uptight about it too, Souryu was already being a.."  
  
A swift, disciplinary glance from the class rep put that particular line of thought to rest, though in a shallow grave, to be sure.  
  
"Uh, yeah," Moving right along, "anyways, when I was out on the roof at lunch, that one day, Ayanami came up too. I don't know if she was looking for me or for Shinji really, but I talked to her for a sec, an then Shinji showed up on the roof on the next building over. He just sort of stood there, looking at me an Ayanami for a while. I think he was looking for me too."  
  
He looked to Kensuke for any kind of confirmation since he was sure that Shinji and Kensuke would have been eating lunch together at least, even if he weren't there with them. Getting none, he frowned a little, and went on.  
  
"He knew somethin was up, I mean Ayanami wouldn't normally have any reason to talk to me, let alone come up to the roof lookin for me. He knew about the new eva comin in, an that they musta got a pilot for it. If we were gonna be teammates fightin angels now, I just figured I oughta go ahead and tell him and get it over with."   
  
The trio let that sit for a while, the edge of the sun just barely visible over the horizon line anymore.  
  
"How'd he take it?" Kensuke asked, still looking off at what remained of today's view of the earth's nearest star, now just a quivering sliver of red, losing ground at both ends.   
  
Silently, Touji was relieved that Kensuke had said something at last, and took a deep breath, anxious now to continue so he could get to the part with his sister.   
  
The chance, of course, was denied him.  
  
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"ASUKAAAAAAAA!"  
  
Misato's voice emerged as a high pitched irregularity amid the methodical thumping sounds of air whipping around the blades of the Nerv emergency rescue helicopter. The woman, anxious that she be at the girl's side as soon as possible, dropped from a considerable height to the ground below before the copter had even set down, nearly doubling the workload of the medical team still aboard.  
  
Asuka, herself, was laying on her back in the grass, feeling the draft from the landing helicopter increase in strength to a strong wind throwing a chill across her body and tearing at the shirt and sports jacket that lay over her torso and thighs, reflexively her hands clutched weakly at them to hold them to her, it was about as reflexive and and firm a grip as that of an infant.   
  
The shirt was Kensuke's school shirt, the jacket, Touji's. She was laying beneath them in order to keep whatever measure of body heat she could preserve against the night's chill and her own deepening shock.   
  
Extreme muscle fatigue, dehydration, mental stress, and sleep deprivation. (She hadn't been sleeping well for weeks now, but she wasn't about to let anybody on to that.) The combination of these had made for a miserable experience for Asuka since she had emerged from the underground tunnel.   
  
Almost as soon as she stepped foot out of the gate, which had opened out onto a large grassy field looking down to the downtown area, with the sun warming her body once again, the shaking had begun. Minor at first, enough to garner her attention and annoyance, but it was nothing debilitating. The debilitating part happened later. After about ten minutes more of walking, she simply fell over when her legs ceased to move. She was venomously annoyed at this, looking back at her own legs. They were still there, still connected to her. There was no numbness to them. She swore at them, invoking them to action and obedience. Then the cramps had begun.  
  
Beginning in her legs, the spasms began twisting and pulling at the fibers of her muscle tissue. When she cried out from the pain, her empty stomach revolted, issuing a stream of bile from it's depths that effectively silenced her while only adding to the affliction.   
  
For a while it was all she could do to just lay out flat and let the tiny pockets of combustible gas that seemed to have built up within her body explode, hurtling shrapnel deep into organs and bone. Her lungs burned, unable to draw breath, and only filling with the noxious burning gases cast off in the explosions of all the internal land mines that were all somehow set top go off now.   
  
When that agony had expired, and left her only with the mild inconvenience of a sharp pain every time she drew too deep a breath, as well as the wretched tang of gastric juices in her mouth and stinging her chapped lips, she tried again to move. To her abysmally bitter amusement, she found that if she wished to move, she would have to drag herself by her hands, as her legs were still unresponsive, merely twitching uselessly. And so she did that, arm over arm, the earth digging beneath her fingernails, only vaguely aware that she had been heading in the direction of the city, and so continuing on that impulse.  
  
After some time, as the sky grew more deeply colored, and the low breeze that swept low, bending the tips of each blade of grass around her picked up, she had heard Hikari. She chittered from the back of her throat and surrendered her consciousness for a time.  
  
She felt almost no cohesion to herself now, no definite boundaries where this pain began or this ache ended, or even what was pain and what was just feeling. She felt amorphous, throbbing, bleeding out in several directions, then drawn back like the tide, towards some common center. She knew someone, Misato, had called her name, but she didn't know if she'd heard it, or if someone was telling her that misato had called her, or if she'd read it in a book somewhere a long time ago. Everything was growing thinner and further out of reach.  
  
A part of her couldn't stand it.   
A part of her couldn't care less.  
  
She suddenly felt pressure on her shoulder, moving underneath to her shoulderblade and then to her back. The pressure increased, it might push through her back and out her chest, she thought. Then she felt her neck stretch - tight in the front, pinched in the back - as her head lolled backwards while her torso was pulled up from the ground. She felt pressure, softer now, and a little bit of warmth around her chest and on either side of her body around her arms. She felt her head cradled now, softly supported with more warmth now seeping onto her cheek.  
  
"Mi...Misa....to."  
  
"Shhhhhhh Asuka, I'm right here. Just rest. We're going to get you to a hospital soon, just.."  
  
"I.." The delirious girl interrupted,   
  
"....I hate.... you..."  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
"...........I know, Asuka.... I know."  
  
  
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After Ayanami had turned away from Unit 01and made her way to the locker rooms, she found herself again transfixed on the curtain that divided the locker rooms. Formerly the line had been drawn at Ikari-kun on one side and the girls on the other, now the line existed to separate just pilot Souryu from herself.   
  
Just them two, the only two existing pilots on active status.  
  
Outside, staring up at Unit 01, she had been pondering the whereabouts of Pilot Ikari's presence, or 'soul'. The continued existence of which, somehow, she had not even questioned. Now, though, the existence and the whereabouts of that 'soul' or whatever it is that remained of him seemed irrelevant, in the face of the fact that they had no way of retrieving that element or making use of it.   
  
Up to that point, Ayanami was not sure whether she had held any expectations of the recovery operation.   
Failure?   
Success?   
What had really been the objectives here?   
She knew The Commander's penchant of veiling motives within motives, and so it was not unreasonable, she thought, to suppose that the Third Children was not, in fact, intended to be salvaged. The Commander had not given any indication to her that the recovery of the Third Children was not the intended result of today's operation. All that she had observed seemed to suggest that reinstating the Third Children, or at least Unit 01, to active operational status was a priority. Her own duties and functions had been relegated to second class on that account.  
  
Her thumb hovering above the button to decompress her plug suit, she attempted to decipher how she felt about the prospect that the Third Children was not intended to be recovered.   
  
There was no reason for her to know one way or the other. The status of Pilot Ikari had no bearing on her own purpose as outlined by The Commander. Pilot Ikari was unnecessary to her ability to function, she would be able to fulfill her role independent of his presence or not. The Third Children had been a necessity at a certain point, and he had certainly proven his usefulness since then, but had his usefulness ended?   
  
With the advent of the functional Dummy Plug System, perhaps the necessity of Pilot Ikari had been negated. Ayanami was uncertain of this. The Dummy Plug had been employed with successful results once. This did not, in her understanding, constitute a basis for reliability. Pilot Ikari had been reliable in his performance thus far, and in that respect, seemed preferable, at least for now, to the Dummy Plug.   
  
Yes, it was preferable to have Pilot Ikari available. Even if he confounded her personally, he was an asset to them professionally.   
  
So, she reasoned, it was perfectly logical to regard Pilot Ikari's continued absence as a bad thing.   
  
She then paused, in the process of slipping the plug suit from her shoulder as another thought came to her.  
  
'Continued absence?' By all indications, shouldn't she begin regarding the situation as his permanent absence?  
  
At this prospect, her displeasure increased. Her brow furrowed.  
  
Ayanami was beginning to feel that her displeasure was bordering on becoming as personal as it was simply professional. She had already established that it was reasonable to prefer Pilot Ikari's presence to his absence - professionally - and that his absence was a bad thing - professionally - but her growing unease with the idea of perhaps not being able to resolve any of the question in her mind concerning The Third without his renewed presence was something she could only point out as a personal issue.   
Her own personal loss.   
  
Again she thought back to a statement she'd made to Pilot Ikari, that she had nothing else, nothing but eva. Recently, her thoughts had begun to make her question that notion. She had lost nothing in regards to her own ability to pilot, her bond to eva still well intact. But she knew that what she felt was not comfortable, and that it seemed to stem from Pilot Ikari's absence. She knew that other people, sometimes felt discomfort when separated from another, and that sometimes separation from one specific person caused this discomfort to manifest quite strongly. It's name she knew but she knew not it's details.   
  
Other people called it 'lonliness'.  
  
She didn't know what to call it, because 'lonliness' ,as she'd been told, was not something that she should experience. Not out of impropriety necessarily, but because she was 'different'.  
  
She'd been told this as long as she could remember.  
  
There had been many things that had been explained as things that she should not experience, or have to experience, for that reason. And thus far it had been sufficient reason enough. She may experience some feelings in her life, but, she had been told, they would not be what other's felt, and those others, in turn would not understand what she felt. She had seen this kind of mutual inability to understand another's feelings exhibited among people who ought to share many similarities. Pilot Ikari and Commander Ikari, first and foremost to her thinking. These two, who ought not to be so different, being of the same family, seemed to share no understanding between themselves. If people without so much 'difference' between them could not have an understanding of feelings, what chance was there that anyone might understand or relate to her own.   
  
She had no kindred. No one who shared her unique position.   
  
She was different.  
  
Replaceable.  
  
If it had been she that disappeared in the cockpit of Unit 01, she wondered would they have needed to attempt to salvage her soul in order to transfer it to a new body, or could they have gone from a previous back up.  
  
For a time she mulled over this, while she stepped into the shower compartment and rinsed her body of the LCL. Under the running water, as she moved her hands about over the surface of her skin to coax the drier remnants of the substance from herself, she took notice of her body and was rewarded with an unexpected notion.   
  
The clones.  
  
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After the helicopter had pulled away from the hill, heading back towards the city. The two friends stood by for a while, watching it recede into the evening sky.  
  
Hikari had gone back along with Asuka in the helicopter. She would be permitted to stay with Asuka up until the point where, if deemed necessary, she would be transferred to a special Nerv Hospital, but it looked as though Asuka would remain stable so long as she got proper treatment shortly. By going back and having to say goodbye to her previous companions early, it allowed her some time to be close to her desperate looking friend and also served to get the young lady home at a reasonable hour.   
  
Touji and Kensuke would have probably gone back with them as well, but with the bulk of the medical equipment and the extra passengers already riding along, Touji's wheel chair would not fit. So he and Kensuke had stayed behind, assuring Misato that they would be catching the rail train shortly to get back home.   
  
When the sound of the Helicopter was distant in their ears, Kensuke spoke up, saying:  
  
"So what was his reaction?"  
  
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Standing before the doors to the clone tanks, Ayanami, hesitated for just a moment. in her hand she held her Nerv card, ready to slide it through the reader to gain access. She had never been forbidden from coming here on her own, it had never been a question of that before. Her card, by itself, would grant her access without the addition of The Commander or Vice Commander's cards or Doctor Akagi's access codes, so she reasoned that their presence was not completely necessary to grant permission to enter the room. As exclusive as the area was, if she had access, she thought it not preposterous to suppose she had the right to enter there unaccompanied. The door here was nigh invisible to any routine Magi scan. Her accessing it would not show up on the register unless specifically looked for via special authorization that only the key players possessed. Unless she was being searched for by those certain few, she was effectively off the radar.  
  
She'd come here seeking, she knew not really what, but she thought that perhaps if she spent some time she might find something. She had no kin or kindred, but these clones were identical to her in all but substance, she wondered then what it might be like to see if there was anything to be understood between them.  
  
And so she slid her card on through, entered through the open doorway before it sealed shut again on it's timer, and looked on, the lights in the room gradually rising to a muted intensity, activated by the opening of the door.   
  
For the first time in her experience she found herself alone in the room; alone with the many faces of Ayanami Rei, and hers, the only one not looking deliriously ecstatic.   
  
  
  
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to be continued  
  
  
  
  
d  
idward@mac.com


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